Introduction
As an employee of County Community College, I teach an Adult Basic Skills Numeracy class. I originally started the academic year with 18 learners, but by April 2015 I had approximately 6 learners per session. Most learners are female, of Afro-Caribbean or African origin and aged between 20 and 50 years. It has been suggested that many learners see numeracy as a male domain (Cemen, 1987; Gutbezahl, 1995; Levine, 1995; Miller et al, 1994) and I have noticed that I teach predominantly female learners who are particularly shy and have low self esteem. They are also full of self doubt and lack confidence in their mathematical ability and some do not see numeracy as a useful subject when compared to literacy. To some it is just a means to an end and not something to learn for the sake of self-improvement.
Most learners are not in full time employment when they start the course, but as the course proceeds, approximately half of all learners will leave to take a job. The main motivation of learners is to achieve a numeracy qualification and couple this with a literacy qualification and use this as route for entry into the Access to Higher Education programs offered either by County Community College or neighboring colleges. Most of the learners can see the benefit of gaining qualifications as a way of improving their lifestyles by allowing them to have more employment options. The majority of learners have school age children and it has been noted that a lot of the learners want to make a good example for their children in regards to education and employment.
I have chosen two learners to use for a case study of learning difficulties experienced by adult numeracy learners. The learning difficulties that are ...
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...on to the special section. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 130 (June): 163
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Bibliography
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During this lesson, I pushed my students to be able to justify their answers using their knowledge of tens and ones. While not explicitly taught during any of the curriculum lessons, it is a skill required on a number of questions on the test. I predict that some students will struggle with this portion of the test due to their lack of practice using academic language to rationalize their answers. My students “know” what numbers are greater or less, but during this lesson I still heard “I just knew” instead of them going back to their models every time to cite evidence to support their answer. As I finish out this year, and as I think about my teaching practice next year, this is definitely an area of growth that I want to focus
Math anxiety is a negative emotional reaction to mathematics that can be debilitating, It has been defined as a feeling of tension and anxiety that interfere with the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems in ordinary life and academic situations. Math anxiety often results in a lack of confidence in the subject, which impedes academic performance. It perilous hurdle for many children across all grade levels. Individuals with math anxiety often avoid studies in mathematics and therefore limit their career options (Hembree, 1990). Hence, interventions are imperative in order to prevent further affecting students success in both academic and life itself.
Eleven-year-old Anna is outgoing and bright. She attempts to work hard, but her progress in school has always been slow. She is a year behind her peers, particularly in her English class and her teachers have slowly begun to reduce their expectations of her. Her parents are worried because her confidence for learning is decreasing, and there is less motivation for her to do homework and class assignments. A psychologist found that her intelligence is in the gifted range, but she has difficulty in making out written symbols. It is easy to make the assumption that Anna seems merely as a child who is slow intellectually, but when taking a closer look, it shows that she is just as intelligent but happens to suffer from a learning disorder. Students with learning disorders have brain impairments that make it difficult for them to acquire skills and knowledge accurately and fast enough to keep pace with average academic progress (Encarta, 2003, p.1). The purpose of this research paper is to investigate the causes of learning disorders, various types of disabilities, their causes, and finally how in today’s modern era assistive technology is able to reduce the frustration of students and increase their level of performance.
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Attending class is the biggest challenge. With most adult learners having to work full time and most classes being on weekdays, it is very difficult for them to get to class. Even stay at home mothers and fathers have huge time commitments and needs of growing family and children. Many of them find it difficult to find baby-sitters during the day time. Even evening classes and weekend classes, are available only for general education and business oriented courses. Continuing education programs which are available on the weekends are job specific and don’t provide enough flexibility in finding jobs. Many who choose to return to school are the ones who have been recently laid off from their jobs and may have even sold their cars to meet the financial situation. For them commuting by a public transport like bus or train may be long and tedious. Again, online classes and hybrid classes may be the only solution to this problem. With today’s technological advances they can be accessed anywhere and anytime using smartphones or tablets, like while commuting to work in a public transport or during lunch hour at
The classroom is a diverse place where learners from all different genres of life meet. Included in these learners are those that display learning disabilities. According to the British Columbia School Superintendent’s Association, ‘learning disabilities refer to a number of conditions that might affect the acquisition, organization, retention, understanding or use of verbal or nonverbal information. These disorders affect learning in individuals who otherwise demonstrate at least average abilities essential for thinking and/or reasoning’. They also posit that ‘learning disabilities result from impairments in one or more processes related to perceiving, thinking, remembering or learning. These include, but are not limited to language processing,
Researchers agree on the fact that while there is no credible evidence that learning styles exist, neither is there evidence to the contrary (Reiner & Willingham, 2010). Different people have different preferences for learning, a fact that all researchers agree on. These preferences can be affected by an individual’s interests, abilities, and background knowledge (Reiner & Willingham, 2010). Studies show that while students have a preferred style of learning, if material is presented in another method, the learning is equivalent.
4.Leder, Gilah C. Mathematics Achievement and Fear of Success. Journal for Research in Mathematics, 13(1982), 124-135.
“A learning style is a way of learning and refers to the way that you learn new information” (2). Most people have one preferred learning style and perform to a lesser standard when learning in a different style than what they’re used to. Nowadays, children are told to take a quiz in school to determine what their preferred learning style is, but after a few years, not many of these children remember what their preferred learning style is, or even if they do, they don’t apply it to their learning.
Years 14 to 19 are the transition stages of a student from the end of their compulsory study based of the guidelines set by the national curriculum, to other learning styles that aid the pathways to higher education, training, employment and further life long learning. This than allows students to gain the necessar...
While numeracy and mathematics are often linked together in similar concepts, they are very different from one another. Mathematics is often the abstract use of numbers, letters in a functional way. While numeracy is basically the concept of applying mathematics in the real world and identifying when and where we are using mathematics. However, even though they do have differences there can be a similarity found, in the primary school mathematics curriculum (Siemon et al, 2015, p.172). Which are the skills we use to understand our number systems, and how numeracy includes the disposition think mathematically.
Do I Have to Teach Math? Early Childhood Pre-Service Teachers’ Fears of Teaching Mathematics, is a research article written three researches from Illinois Sate University. Alan B. Bates, Nancy I. Latham, and Jin-ah Kim focused their study on indentifying by pre-service teachers their fears towards mathematics. These researchers also looked for the source of those specific fears as well as for explanation provided by the participants. As “mathematics” is a polarizing word for many people, very often it evokes numerous personal reactions, commonly anxiety reaction. Surprisingly, we are not speaking here only about students, but more importantly about people who teach mathematics. This study indicates that many teachers have fears about teaching
...S. and Stepelman, J. (2010). Teaching Secondary Mathematics: Techniques and Enrichment Units. 8th Ed. Merrill Prentice Hall. Upper Saddle River, NJ.
The term learning disabilities is widely accepted for what it is, but what exactly is it? Developing a definition for learning disabilities proved to be a formidable challenge according to Janet Lerner, in fact it was such an overpowering task it has been compared to “Justice Potter Stewart’s comment on pornography: impossible to define, “but I know it when I see it.”” (Lerner 2002, p.8)
Education is a profession which requires a teacher to be able to communicate with a multitude of students on a variety of levels. There is not a class, or student for that matter, that is identical. Therefore, teachers must be able to identify and help educate students from all different types of backgrounds and at different levels. Teaching a singular subject presents difficulties, but teaching students with disabilities should not be one. There are three main teaching areas that need to be focused on when teaching a student with a learning disability. Teachers need to focus on the strategies that will assist students with reading comprehension skills, writing skills, and maintaining appropriate behaviors in a classroom setting.