Article- Aiming for Understanding: Lessons learned about writing mathematics

The article states how hard it is for teachers across the country to get students communicating about math whether it been infront of people or on paper. Teachers need to get students to feel comfortable with writing about math they cannot just give them a piece of paper and a pencil and expect them to do it correctly. The author says that students need to be provided with support like graphic organizers, demonstrations, and modeling, tips for improving written work, and specific lesson on ways to more effectively write or describe ideas (O'Connell, 2005).

Cooperative learning was a main part of the study that the teachers from the college level and elementary level noticed when working together. The student's benefitted because it allowed them to come up with more ideas from talking to another person. Being with a partner was a non-threatening environment because they did not have to share with the whole class if they did not want to. Problem solving activities were also another concept that was written about in this article. The students were writing out how they were solving the problems and it helped the teacher a lot because then she could follow the students logic step by step. The author stated that problem solving used to be an assessment tool but now they were using it as an instructional tool (O'Connell, 2005).

There were many good and bad examples of the communication process in this article. It helped for me to see where these elementary teachers were making mistakes and why they were getting so frustrated when their students could not explain the answers. This article was very interesting because it had a lot of different concepts that explained how students could using writing when doing mathematics. There were examples of what the teachers did in their classrooms and how they fixed the problems that they were having with their students communicating their answers through writing. Over all, I really liked this article because it showed me not only good techniques when trying to get students to communicate about math, but also the bad techniques that some teachers are using.

O’Connell, S. R., Beamon, C., Beyea, J. M., Denvir, S. S., Dowdall, L. A., Friedland, N. G. and

Ward, J. D. (2005). Aiming for understanding: Lessons learned about writing

mathematics. Teaching Children Mathematics 12 (4), 192-199.