Know your students: Implications for instruction
Students' progress in their cognitive development varies widely. Students may appear cognitively sophisticated in one area but naive in another. New and difficult concepts should be taught by beginning at a concrete level and proceeding
Know your students: Implications for instruction
Students' progress in their cognitive development varies widely. Students may appear cognitively sophisticated in one area but naive in another. New and difficult concepts should be taught by beginning at a concrete level and proceeding to the more abstract and quantitative. However, whatever the reasoning level of a student, improvement should be expected.
Research has clearly shown that students can use sophisticated reasoning with new and difficult concepts if the learning context is familiar to them. Therefore, whenever possible, such concepts should be presented in "real world" contexts. Where actual applications are not possible, analogies may be used. However, teachers need to take care to avoid generating confusion when using analogies. Attention should be drawn to similarities and differences between the two contexts being compared.
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