What's Math Got to Do with It? Quotes

“Diagnostic, comment-based feedback is now known to promote learning, and it should be the standard way in which students’ progress is reported.”
― Jo Boaler, What's Math Got to Do with It?: How Teachers and Parents Can Transform Mathematics Learning and Inspire Success

“When an official report in the UK was commissioned to examine the mathematics needed in the workplace, the investigator found that estimation was the most useful mathematical activity. Yet when children who have experienced traditional math classes are asked to estimate, they are often completely flummoxed and try to work out exact answers, then round them off to look like an estimate. This is because they have not developed a good feel for numbers, which would allow them to estimate instead of calculate, and also because they have learned, wrongly, that mathematics is all about precision, not about making estimates or guesses. Yet both are at the heart of mathematical problem solving.”
― Jo Boaler, What's Math Got to Do with It?: Helping Children Learn to Love Their Least Favorite Subject--and Why It's Important for America

“Some students think their role in math classrooms is to memorize all the steps and methods. Other students think their role is to connect ideas. These different strategies link, unsurprisingly, to achievement, and the students who memorize are the lowest achieving in the world.”
― Jo Boaler, What's Math Got to Do with It?: How Teachers and Parents Can Transform Mathematics Learning and Inspire Success

“Grades may be useful for communicating where students are in relation to each other, and it is fine to give them at the end of a semester or term, but if they are given more frequently than that, they will reduce the achievement of many.”
― Jo Boaler, What's Math Got to Do with It?: How Parents and Teachers Can Help Children Learn to Love Their Least Favorite Su bject