A couple of weeks ago, I met up with friend of mine who is still teaching in a renowned JC. He was lamenting how students today don’t study for the sake of learning. So I thought of sharing a learning (teaching) method which I adopt with my students: Meta-Cognition Approach. This approach starts with the students being aware and understanding his/ her own thought process while learning.
Mathematical problem solving is often best treated with meta-cognition methods. So instead of doing the same type of question 10 times and secretly pray that it comes out in exam, I often encourage my students to think about what they’ve learnt. When they meet a question, be it a new type, they will then be able to have somewhat a starting point. Through this, they think more and most questions can be solved then. If a student is able to learn how to think properly with any question, that shows they exhibit stronger foundations too.
In the 2014 A-level, we saw a handful of questions asking students such as:
- “what can be said”,
- “what do you think”
These are qualitative questions which test students on how much understanding they have of the topics.
At the same time, I strongly encourage students to see the 24 topics in A-level as one subject and not segregate the learning of the topics. Topics such as complex numbers and vectors can easily be tested together, so can Complex Numbers and Maclaurin’s. And only if students learn the topics as a whole subject can they tackle these surprise questions effectively.
If you want to learn more, check out my Math class schedule.
