Guerrero, S. M. (2010). The Value of Guess & Check. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, 15(7), 392-398.
This article attempts to justify the importance of guess & check. Guerrero suggests that when students are taught how to make educated guesses, it's much easier for them to make more educated guesses with later situations. They are able to learn directly from the immediate problem they might be working on but they are also able to learn generalized techniques for other problems Guerrero specifically uses an example of a story problem where students have to find the individual lengths to each side of an enclosed fence.
I believe that guess and check is always a valuable tool, especially when you don't know at all what to do. In fact, I've never questioned the validity of the technique. I think it's a powerful learning tool, especially when students are wrong. They can see where they went wrong and what they can do to fix it. There's so much learning that can come from getting things wrong. I've noticed with my school work, when I get things wrong, it's more of a motivation for me to go back and figure out where I went wrong and how to fix it. After that, I usually have that knowledge forever because I took time to learn it.
9 years ago
Great summary and explanation of the main idea. It was very clear. You had great ideas in the second paragraph. Maybe to maintain a more scholarly tone, try not using so many "I"s, and make it more general. I would have liked to hear about how what you learned in your article will affect how you teach, and what ideas you might specifically initiate into your classroom. I liked that you were very concise and straight to the point. Great job!
ReplyDeleteI thought that you have a strong topic sentence for the first paragraph. I also felt that the content of the paragraph matched and supported the topic sentence. I would have appreciated a little more detail, such as an example from the paper that illustrated what might be learned from guess and check while doing a specific problem, both in terms of a solution method for that problem type and generalized techniques for other problems.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't sure what the topic sentence was for the second paragraph. By the time I got to sentence 3, I felt confident that you were supporting the author's main point. However, I would have liked to know that more clearly up front.
I was also really interested in your own learning from guess and check. I would have appreciated a specific example. I also liked the part about how being wrong and figuring out how to do it right makes the knowledge more lasting for you.
You did a great job on constructing a very clear topic sentence that had good supporting sentences to back it up. The only thing I would suggest for the first paragraph would be to maybe go in a little more depth about the example he used and to discuss how it affected the learning of the children.
ReplyDeleteYour blog was very easy to read. You provided a lot of brief general information that was helpful to understanding what was happening in the article. You did a wonderful job of staying on topic and focused. I did feel like I didn't know very many specifics about the article, so I would have been interested in having a little bit more detail.
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