A Model for Understanding Understanding in Mathematics

This article was about the use of "moves" or in other words steps to help students understand their processing skills. This article addressed how teachers can phrase certain questions to better understand their students' current understanding of the topic. The article provided many different detailed examples of how certain "move" questions would look and to what goal they are aiming for. The article addressed different levels of moves and different focus points; for example, examples of the concept and understanding what the generalization and why that generalization is accurate. They also discus moves that will help students understand the process to the problem and why that process is correct for the situation at hand. The last moves the article addresses is the understanding of the outcomes and why the outcome makes sense and is accurate to the findings of the problem. The article explains how moves help teachers from questions of understanding for their students in both a lesson setting and a testing setting. Research shows that the moves do not need to be done in a specific order; however they should follow a logical order and be at the student's level of cognitive development with the situation at hand.

I really liked this article. With being a math concentration I have taken my fair share of math courses here at Bradley; however we have never really discussed how to teach our students or measure their level of understanding. I really found these moves to be very informative. They better showed me how to phrase questions to understand my students' understanding of the topic at hand. I think that these moves should be placed at the end of a teacher's lesson plan. I think it would be a good idea for her to come up with a few possible moves that the students could benefit from. She could come up with a list of moves in the order in which she would as them and if she had a student with a math learning disability she should compile a different set of moves developed around that student's cognitive ability level. I am excited to keep this information with me and to use these moves in my classroom in the future.