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Resources for Staff
- - Effective use of Zoom for Teaching Mathematics
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- Teaching students maths so they learn
- - What is a mental model?
- - We are different from most of our students
- - Student maths mental models
- - Doing maths without good mental models
- - Six differences between mental models in experts and novices
- - Part 2: Teaching students how to develop good mental models
- - Part 3: What to do?
- - References
3. Level of detail
Experts and novices have different levels of detail in their models.
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Strong students make more detailed mental models. Expert mental representations demonstrate superior extent, depth and level of detail They accommodate more interconnections and are more geared towards action.
Weak students, on the other hand, have simpler, fuzzier models with less interconnections that are less useful.
Expert model | Novice model |
Expert and novice models for the normal distribution. Note that this is only an illustration and does not reflect actual mental models!
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