Teaching Mathematics Through Problem Solving

When do you decide what mathematical tasks you will use?

• During the lesson

• After the lesson

• While preparing for the lesson

Teachers can use problem solving to help students to understand mathematics concepts.

• True

• False

Why is it good for a teacher to have strong content knowledge of the mathematics that they are teaching?

• To show authority in the classroom

• Because these teachers are better able to provide multiple representations of the same concept

• So that they can clearly outline the steps to solving a problem to the student

• So that they can quickly provide students with the answers

When teaching mathematics through problem solving, the teacher moves around mainly to

• ensure that students are on task

• to help students who get stuck

• to observe how students are solving the problem

• the teacher doesn't need to move around as this distracts the students

When selecting a task for your lesson, what is your primary goal?

• The task must be fun

• The task must be easy

• The task must encourage mathematical reasoning

Effective teaching of mathematics

establishes clear goals for the mathematics that students are learning, situates goals within

learning progressions, and uses the goals to guide instructional decisions.

• True

• False

When students are engaged in tasks that promote problem solving they should rely more on abstract thinking than using tools and representations (e.g. diagrams)

• True

• False

A kindergartner teacher gives her students a task where she ask them to find numbers that they can add to get the number 8. The cognitive demand for this task is

• low

• high

• Low-level cognitive demand

• High-level cognitive demand

A grade 1 teacher provides her students with the following task:

Six bowls of cereal are placed at two different tables. Draw a picture to show a way that six bowls might be placed at two tables. Can you find more than one way?

This task's cognitive demand is

• low

• high