Teaching Math, Science, and Technology in Schools Today

Guidelines for Engaging Both Eager and Reluctant Learners

By (author) Dennis Adams, Mary Hamm

Publication date:

19 February 2014

Length of book:

176 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781475809039

Teaching Math, Science, and Technology in Schools Today: Guidelines for Engaging Both Eager and Reluctant Learners offers unique, engaging, and thought-provoking ideas. The activities open imaginative doors to learning and provide opportunities for all learners. It surveys today’s most important trends and dilemmas while explaining how collaboration and critical thinking can be translated into fresh classroom practices. Questions, engagement, and curiosity are viewed as natural partners for mathematical problem solving, scientific inquiry, and learning about technology. Like the Common Core State Standards, the book builds on the social nature of learning to provide suggestions for both eager and reluctant learners. The overall goal of the book is to deepen the collective conversation, challenge thinking, and provide some up-to-date tools for teachers so they can help reverse the steady erosion of math, science, and technology understanding in the general population.

Preface
Chapter 1: Helping All Students Learn About Math and Science
Chapter 2: Creative and Inventive Thinking: Collaborative Inquiry, Open-Ended Problem Solving, and Innovation
Chapter 3: Mathematical Problem Solving: Reasoning and Collaborating in an Age of Data
Chapter 4: Science Involving All Students with Active Involvement and Collaborative Inquiry
Chapter 5: Technology: The Powerful Possibility of Tools

In this clear and concise book, Adams and Hamm demonstrate how collaborative inquiry and problem solving strategies can be used to engage both eager and reluctant learners in math, science, and technology. The book provides examples of activities that can be used in K–8 classrooms and shows how the activities can be used to differentiate instruction for learners at different ability levels. The activities covered include a variety of math content, such as numbers and operations, fractions, patterns and functions, algebra, geometry, and measurement. It also has some activities to enhance students' science inquiry and process skills, such as observing, comparing, hypothesizing, experimenting, and communicating. The suggested activities are replicable in elementary classrooms. Throughout the book, the authors argue for a learner-centered pedagogy that encourages students to think creatively and constructively. The book has five chapters, and each chapter has a list of questions at the end, which can provide guidance for teachers and prospective teachers to engage students in mathematics and science learning. This is a valuable resource for mathematics and science educators. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate and research collections.