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Improving Math Instruction With Visuals

October 15, 2007

Students who don’t do well in algebra generally don’t take any further mathematics courses and therefore face fewer options at the college level and in their careers. To make algebra instruction more meaningful to more students, Mitchell Nathan and colleagues investigate how middle school students learn from teachers’ instructional language in their algebra classes. One factor is teachers’ use of visual ‘scaffolding.’ Scaffolding can include a number of things, including pointing, representational gestures, diagrams, and other methods of highlighting visual information. Scaffolding may be particularly important in mathematics instruction because students’ comprehension is challenged by new concepts and unfamiliar terms. This research has three aims:

• To document how teachers use visual scaffolding as they teach;
• To investigate whether teachers’ visual scaffolding promotes students’ learning; and
• To investigate how visual scaffolding may promote learning, by heightening students’ attention to the lesson, or by helping them encode visual information.

More information is available here.