'When students learn through visual approaches, mathematics changes for them, and they are given access to deep and new understandings' (Jo Boaler, 2018).
Cooperative work between mathematics educators and neuroscientists, such as that of Jo Boaler’s You Cubed project at Stanford University, has generated new teaching strategies that depart from the abstract, formulaic approach to teaching which is common in many high schools and elementary schools throughout Europe and the English-speaking countries. The new approaches rely heavily on visualisation as a teaching strategy for mathematics.
In this session I will report on a mathematics program which used only visual strategies - but no formulas - to teach mathematics to first year nursing students at an Australian University from 2016-2018. Much of the mathematics needed by the nurses was at upper-primary to lower-high school level, so the visual teaching strategies used would be appropriate for school students as well as beginning university students who need mathematics, such as pharmacy and veterinary science.
Mathematics topics included place value, multiplication and division, fractions, decimals, percentages, proportion, rates and measurement conversions. One particular visualisation, the 'region model', was used in different ways to support most of this learning. In this paper, I show how the region model was adapted in various ways to convey conceptual understanding of these mathematics topics. Some of these adaptations were taken from the mathematics literature; others were developed by the presenter as she taught the course. Presenting one visual model as primary, and adpating it to different contexts, proved a highly efficient way to teach the above mathematical concepts. The use of one visual model, albeit with adaptations, lowered the cognitive load for students, and also encouraged them to conceptually link the mathematics topics to each other. This produced a high level of success for students; much higher than had ever been the case for first year nursing students at this university.
In 2017, results from the 9-hour tutoring program were very good. The lowest achieving students (n-37) scored 52% in a 25-question pre-test, 88% in a post -test after 9 weeks of tutoring for 1 hour per week, and 88% in a second post test that was taken 21 weeks after the pre-test, and 12 weeks after the tutoring stopped, showing they had retained their mathematical understanding 3 montsh after the course ended.
The program will be repeated in March and April 2018, during which the use of visualisations will be further refined, and student feedback on this teaching/learning approach will be gathered. Accordingly I will be able to present the 2018 results by the time the conference occurs.