I encountered some frustrations today in the Math Lab and I am just wondering how others have handled it.
I have a Math 70 tutuee that I have been working with for a couple of months. He is still struggling adding and subtracting negatives and I feel like we have finally made some progress with this. It is especially important since we are now working with polynomials.
One of the important aspects of tutoring is to help the tutee feel successful with their accomplishments and there lies my frustration today. The program that is used for the math tutorials and learning sessions does not seem very user friendly. The tutee was finally getting the concept. Today when entering answers in the computer and using the drop down process it has to enter an equation, he made a mistake. If he were taking the test obviously it would have been wrong. If a teacher had looked at his paper he would have had the right answer. To me what it boils down to is the students are having to learn the 2 aspects. They have to learn the math, that they are struggling with, and then they need to be technically savvy also.
The other problem that occurred was the computer basically allows the answer to be one way and one way only. While working with polynomials the student entered 1xy + 3x + 9 and it was wrong. What the computer wanted was xy + 3x + 9. It just seems at a time when we are trying to build confidence and help them to understand the process this is counterproductive. I did not catch what was wrong and when trying to back up a couple of pages to reread the tutorial the computer put us back to the beginning of doing the module.
All of these things combined only take away from the learning process, gets the student frustrated and makes them question a process they are already lacking confidence about.
Yeah, that sounds to me like an issue with the program. I reckon you don't have any recourse for getting the program changed to accept a more diverse set of answers?
ReplyDeleteI guess the best thing you can do at the moment is reassure the student. No matter what the computer said, they did get it right! So there is an accomplishment. Maybe they could also have a note card or something to remind them when they are entering equations into the computer, they need to remove extra digits like the 1 from 1xy. Since they run into these issues during the practice, they can then be aware of it when it comes to test time.