BJ Hemphill

MIAA 340
Article 1 (Grade 8)

Doyle, W. (1983). Academic work. Review of educational research, 53(2), 159-199

Student achievement is at the core of classroom teaching and learning. This
is accomplished by direct and indirect instruction. It is important for teachers to
offer a words of encouragement and authentic praise when students truly deserve
and are in need of valid recognition. Students are astute when it comes to reading
the atmosphere of the classroom and are all too often willing to test the boundaries
to see how far they can push before being reined back in by the teacher.
A classroom that is managed efficiently and effectively allows students the
freedom to experience and develop good work ethics, collaborate within small
groups, and have the ability to make mistakes and revise their own thinking. When
the environment surrounding students is at its peak for optimum learning
experiences, intrinsic motivation takes over. Students work to the best of their
ability to complete and understand the academic work that has been provided for
them to do.
For learning to be meaningful to students it should include more than
procedural or routine tasks where students apply kill and drill strategies or
memorized formulas or algorithms to generate answers. Students who are engaged
in comprehension or understanding tasks are more likely to be effectively engaged
in contriving solutions where they are expected to recognize transformed or
paraphrased versions of information, apply procedures to new problems or decide

from several strategies or procedures which would result in the desired answer, and
draw inferences or make predictions.
Memory versus comprehension, which would you rather students engage in?
Myself, I would prefer the later because with comprehension tasks students usually
talk about their solutions before actually committing to them. In my classroom there
is normally a consistent hum of talking, I can usually recognize when students are
off task because that hum turns into "outside talk," and I immediately squash the
unnecessary and non contextual talk. I'm consistent, fair, and I promote academia
in every sense of the word, because the processes, whether academic or behavior,
have the greatest long term consequences and effects and are the most difficult to
teach.
What I mean to say, is that somehow through doing their academic work, my
students have learned how to respect themselves, others, and the academic work
itself. I would go out on a limb and say, when my students are ready to leave me
and go on to high school, we will all be better individuals because of our
experiences we have had with each other.

BJ Hemphill
MIAA 340
Article 2 (Grade 8)

Parker, M., & Leinhardt, G. (1995). Percent: A privileged proportion. Review of

Education Research, 65(4), 421-481

When we learn about percent don't we just drop the percent symbol, insert a
decimal point to the right of the number, move two places to the left, drop the
decimal point and multiply by whatever number is in the problem? So, why do so
many students have problems when it comes to percent? The article views percent
as an ubiquitous mathematical concept that requires the explanation of the long
history that the concept of percent is derived from. Dating back to its early roots in
Babylonia to Chinese trading practices and finishing up with it parallel roots in
Greek proportional geometry.
I thought I knew all there was to knowing about percent...until I read this
article. What use to be a simple monetary amount of tax or interest per hundred has
evolved into a function used in conjunction with the Rule of Three, to a non
monetary use as a fraction comparing parts to whole, to a ratio comparison
between difference objects and sets, and finally to a number used for comparison of
data expressed in relative form. It has basically become an expression of
comparison.
Percent has lost some of its glamour, while gaining flexibility, percent lost it
situational comparative sense or "so many of 'this' per hundred of 'that.'" The
comparison of two words (per cent) into one word (percent) and eventually to a
mathematical symbol (%), has resulted in the loss of relationally labeled aspects.

Conversions...percent has become an entanglement of conversions. Rules for

changing decimals to fractions, fractions to decimals, improper fractions to mixed
numbers, and mixed numbers to improper fractions - no wonder some of our
students have a difficult understanding what percent really means. After reading
this article, I'm not sure I ever really knew. The emphasis in percent is not what it is
but rather how to compute it quickly.
"Percent is a language used to describe proportional relationships - a concise,
easily ordered, privileged expression quantifying the magnitude of these
relationships. it is privileged in that its use enable us to take advantage of the
natural and powerful ordering of the decimal numeration system. It is a language
that often signals that a privileged proportion is involved, and that sets up a
multiplicative relationship between the referent quantities associated with specific
sets or objects"
Percent has many names and depending on what the need is or the outcome,
percent can be: a comparative index number, an intensive quantity, a fraction, a
ratio, a statistic or a function and in each of these instances, a description of
proportional relationship between two quantities. In spite or and because of its
prevalence, percent has proved consistently hard for people of various ages to learn
and understand.