Teaching Students How to Study Mathematics: A Classroom Approach
For a variety of reasons, students do not know how to study mathematics. In the college-level mathematics classes that I teach, even the A students rarely have a system for attacking large amounts of new material. When asked how they've studied mathematics, most students reply that they do all the assigned homework. The “doing” of the problem is viewed as sufficient for learning. This haphazard approach may lead to success or at least to passing the course in junior and senior high school, where the material is presented in manageable chunks. In college the pace of most courses, whether mainstream or remedial, is such that many students flounder without a method for synthesizing the material. Additionally, since the textbook is opened only to reach the homework problems, students are unlikely to consider a mathematics textbook as a resource. The topic of this article is teaching students, from junior high school through college, strategies for studying mathematics.