TEACHING INQUIRY IN MATH

ABSOLUTE VALUE INQUIRY LAB

​A lot of math is lecture and practice: I’m going to show you how to solve this problem, and then you’ll practice on your own. While this can be a valuable tool, I learned with Dr. Krakowski in my Learning and Cognition course at Azrieli about finding the “shape of knowledge.”

He discussed the idea that students have knowledge stored in their brains, and teaching them something new doesn’t mean that our lessons will now magically replace what they already learned (whether correct or incorrect!). Instead, we have to find the shape of their knowledge and let them explore the new learning to incorporate it with their existing schemata.

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In this activity, instead of telling my students the formula for how to graph absolute value functions, I let them grapple with different functions and their calculators. Through visualizing the different functions, the students on their own were able to deduce the formula for absolute value functions! After the inquiry activity, we did review the formula together along with lots of practice (of course!).

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Even though this lesson took longer than if I had just told them from the get-go, the students knew it so well since they were able to come to the answer on their own. It would have been much easier for me to have lectured, but when I stepped out of the picture and let my students do the exploring, they took charge of their own learning!