Teaching Measurement, Our Weaknesses, and How to Enhance Our Skills through Integration
Measurement is one of the weakest areas in mathematics standardized testing in children in schools in the United States. Beyond just being a source of weakness for Untied States children it is also the content area which has the biggest disparity between Caucasian students and children of minorities. This is confirmed through the testing scores of NAEP and TIMISS. Many teachers cite the two systems of measurement in the United States for being a source of this weakness, as our students are unfamiliar with the metric system; however the actual source of these weaknesses seems to be deeper than this (Thompson & Preston, 2004).
Integrative lessons can be meaningful and beneficial for all content areas and can deepen the lessons learned in all of the areas that are infused together as well as make a lesson more connective to everyday life. Integrative lesson plans are one of the greatest tools that teachers can use to enhance the learning of students in many content areas instead of focusing on one single area. As was discussed in the reading “Is Math Politically Neutral” it is important to integrate other subjects into math, even in small ways, so that the children can be gaining the most from every lesson. (Felton 2010) In this article the discussion was based more on infusing social studies related content and current events with math by creating political and educational story problems. This is one way in which social studies knowledge can also be built in a primarily math lesson where the content learned in a similar problem, without the integration would strictly be math. Children are learning about more information in the same amount of time and therefore are building more knowledge with these deeper lessons.
With measurement it is simple and effective to integrate measurement with science related concepts, where children can use measurement to accurately collect data with different experiments (Thompson & Preston, 2004). This also makes the learning of measurement more realistic, as children are using it in a way that applies to actual everyday life situations.
The benefits of creating an integrative curriculum cannot be overlooked, as children can gain so much more information, and connect this information to their lives more easily, from an integrative lesson plan than a lesson plan more focused on a singular content area. By creating these lessons, teachers are building their students up for more success in life as children are more apt to learn effectively about living in the real world, when encountering more real world, everyday problems in an integrative manner in school.
