Recap of Week 3

Hello! It’s good to see you and i hope that you enjoyed week number three, which was about the Bar Model Method. The Bar Model Method as you’ve seen is a very pictorial approach, and you were commenting nicely underneath the different steps. Some people wondered whether perhaps a such a pictorial really was necessary, because, well, if you can already calculate sums why would you actually make a pictorial representation. And that’s a good point, but especially later on it turns out that the Bar Model method can be a very nice tool in your toolbox when you get more complex tasks. Another point that was made is that sometimes you need some prior knowledge to understand the Bar Model method.

So, for example there was a task with multiples of 25 and we know that 4 times 25 is 100 and this is used, in the solution method

and of course someone commented: “Well, you then have to know this, you need to know your multiples of 25, you need to know that a 100 is a multiple of 25. And I think this emphasises the fact that basic skills, knowing you multiples, knowing your times tables can be very useful exactly for that. Another task that was quite challenging was the animal problem. And in the video i presented two solution methods and quite intentionally I put in one that probably was seen as more difficult first and then an easier one.

There is a research article, which is referenced as well, where actually the researchers looked at students and what method they actually used, and only 9 percent used the first one. So, if you thought the second one was easier or you liked that one more, that would be in agreement with this low percentage for the first method. Of course, if you did use the first method, that’s perfectly fine as well, because you can use both…and both use the Bar Model Method. OK, so in the last week we’re going to turn to Variation Theory.

This has become very popular, also in Western Europe and it looks at the way that you can sequence tasks and vary the different properties of these different tasks, to tease out certain properties and to make sure that perhaps understanding and skills both go hand in hand. And we will also look at some pages again, from a textbook, to see how this is actually designed in that particular textbook, and you are going to make a couple of tasks to emphasise this. OK, I hope you will enjoy the fourth week and I will see you in the comments. comments