Why is reasoning important to teach in primary education levels?
The concept of reasoning within numeracy is
to prompt learners to justify, analyse and evaluate their strategies. In doing
this learners can strengthen their self-confidence by double-checking their
work and test all possible cases. During my primary years, reasoning wasn’t as
emphasised as today’s LNF. The focus was on basic maths involving learning all
of the timetables, simply multiplications without using calculators and angles.
Today, the Welsh Government is paying more attention towards this key strand
and the elements within it. These elements are:
-
Identify processes and
connections
-
Represent and communicate
-
Review
So
why is it important? We need to be reasonable and use the three elements above when:
- We first encounter a new challenge
- Different strategies to solve a problem
- There are missing information
- There is more than one solution
By being reasonable within your work
whether it’s vocally or literary, it demonstrates that children understand
maths. This is important to teach in modern primary education because I believe
that it can give teachers opportunities to pin point weaknesses and what they
can improve on with students who are staying silent when they need assistance.
Gojak
(2012) stated that those who deeply understand mathematics should be opened to
make sense of what they are doing. With my negative maths experiences, I did
not get the chance to stop and think in what I was working on or solving out
hence negative results within my assessments and tests throughout KS3. Although
the tradition approach of coming into the classroom, sit down and the teacher
shows step by step instructions are still carried out in some primary schools
today – the problem with this is that teachers are more likely to confuse
students, restricting them from using different methods due to one
stereotypical pedagogy/methods emphasised within classrooms.
How
can we promote it?
In order to promote reasoning as well as
making numeracy fun, the teacher should always begin a class with tasks to give
children a chance to explore and making connections to previous knowledge and
then choose from a range of strategies to complete the task. In this way, you
are warming up their brains and getting them to think critically about what
they are doing, how they execute it and why.
Having read into depth about this particular topic, it still leaves me a
little bit clueless, as I can’t really relate to the skills of reasoning from
not having it as emphasised as it is nowadays. However, I feel that it is a
good idea to implement this within today’s education, as our next generation of
children will become critical thinkers from a young age so that they will find
maths easier to understand and prevent children from developing maths anxiety.
Do you think you could easily justify,
analyse, communicate and show connections? Find out more on the LNF on Learning
Wales to get your own perception and understanding without me complicating
everything for you!
References:
- Leaning Wales, Welsh Government. Data accessed on:
- Gojak, L. (2012). Reasoning and Making Sense in Mathematics: it’s a
K-12 Focus. National Council of teachers of mathematics.
Hi Eve, great post on reasoning and why it should be taught in primary education! If you want to continue this post, I would suggest looking into Problem Solving.
ReplyDeleteIt has been seen that problem solving increases a child's confidence and independence, aswell as developing collaborative learning and giving a more meaningful reason to maths as a whole (Cotton, 2016). I think problem sovling goes hand in hand with reasoning, so think it would be worth researching.
I have left the reference for where I researched this below.
Cotton, T. (2016) Teaching for Mathematical Understanding. London: Routledge.