Journal Summary 2

The Value of Debts and Credits

Akyuz, D. (2012). The value of debts and credits. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 17(5), 332-338.

Certain teaching practices can support students' mathematical reasoning. The topic in this article is integers, which are typically a challenge in the mathematical community. A persons financial net worth provided the context for the activities in this article. The integer operations used were addition, subtraction, and multiplication. This type of instruction is realistic mathematical education (RME). This type of instruction allows students to use their informal knowledge of mathematics and progress to move towards formal mathematical reasoning. There is a detailed chart in this article that explains how to foster mathematical reasoning. The article is based off of a study done over a five week period in a 7th grade classroom in Central Florida. There were 20 students, 13 boys and 7 girls, 3 students had mild learning disabilities. The data included teacher interviews, audio and video taped classroom sessions, field notes, teacher notes, research meetings, and a collection of student work. The most important practices that have been found to support student reasoning involved: encouraging students to give concrete explanations to think of effective solutions, to make conjectures and prove them, and to provide different and sophisticated solutions. The article demonstrates how an expert teacher incorporates these practices into her teaching. Although this lesson focuses on debts and assets it can be modified to fit other topics. The article then gives a description of the practices and provides classroom examples. Teachers need to know hot to support students mathematical reasoning from concrete to abstract, to motivate, support, and give opportunities to explore mathematical reasoning and concepts.

I thought this article had some really good ideas for including mathematical reasoning into the classroom. I do not recall doing anything like this when I was in middle school, however, times change. I think that including real life scenarios to teach a math lesson is a great idea and is extremely beneficial to the students. The students  feel that it is actually knowledge they need to know, therefore, they will be more enthusiastic and take an interest in the lesson. Personally, I thought thought the wording throughout the article was a little heavy. I am use to reading articles and journals geared toward primary grades, since that is what I would like to teach. This article, geared towards middle school grades, had a lot more wording and mathematical vocabulary that I am not use to. I was not familiar with these practices and so I found this article to be a learning experience for me.