Comprehending Math

Book excerpt: For those who devour Comprehending Math as I did, their teaching will be clearer, bolder, more connected. And for the ultimate beneficiaries, they will have a chance to understand just how integrally our world is connected. Ellin Oliver Keene, author of Mosaic of Thought No matter the content area, students need to develop clear ways of thinking about and understanding what they learn. But this kind of conceptual thinking seems more difficult in math than in language arts and social studies. Fortunately we now know how to help kids understand more about mathematics than ever before, and in Comprehending Math you'll find out that much of math's conceptual difficulty can be alleviated by adapting what we have learned from research on language and cognition. In Comprehending Math Arthur Hyde (coauthor of the popular Best Practice) shows you how to adapt some of your favorite and most effective reading comprehension strategies to help your students with important mathematical concepts. Emphasizing problem solving, Hyde and his colleagues demonstrate how to build into your practice math-based variations of: K - W - L visualizing asking questions inferring predicting making connections determining importance synthesizing He then presents a practical way to "braid" together reading comprehension, math problemsolving, and thinking to improve math teaching and learning. Elaborating on this braided model of approach to problem solving, he shows how it can support planning as well as instruction. Comprehending Math is based on current cognitive research and features more than three dozen examples that range from traditional story problems to open-ended or extended-response problems and mathematical tasks. It gives you step-by-step ideas for instruction and smart, specific advice on planning strategy-based teaching. Help students do math and get it at the same time. Read Comprehending Math, use its adaptations of familiar language arts strategies, and discover how deeply students can understand math concepts and how well they can use that knowledge to solve problems.