STUDENT INTERVIEW REPORT

Group Members: Feda, Zhi Song and Mandeep

This interview was conducted with a three high school students from the west side of Vancouver. The three students with different age level, competency level and gender were interviewed in mathematics classrooms. Based on last year report cards, the first student H was a girl in grade 12 who was assessed as very good at math. The Second was a boy S in grade 9 who was assessed as excellent at math. The third was a boy G in grade 8 who was assessed as fair at math.

Despite the difference among these students, they all agreed about some common believes related to mathematics teaching and learning.

They all saw mathematics as useful in everyday life. However, they stressed the idea that only the basic mathematics is needed for that. They agreed that math is motivating when it makes sense and it is well understood. For these students a good teacher is the one who makes math fun to learn and explains it clearly.

An interesting point appeared through the interview was that two of the students, S who is excellent at mathematics and G who is fair, both preferred to work alone rather than in a group for two different reasons. While S thought that “working in a group would slow me down,” G commented that he liked to work “alone, because when I solve a problem it gives me the confidence that I did it without any help.” On the other side, H preferred to work in a group, because she thought that solving a problem could be a combined effort and that “ everyone is looking from a different perspective to solve the same problem.”

What was obvious from the students’ responses is that students learn differently and a teacher should be aware that different students have different needs. What a teacher could do in this situation is give the student some time to work on a problem alone and then assign them to groups. An excellent student like S will get the chance to help other students in his group after solving the problem on his own. A struggling student like G will get the chance to try to solve the problem alone and then get the help, if needed, from his friends. That might have worked well for G since when he was asked the question

Q: What do you usually do when you face a challenging problem

He answered:

G:Take some time to figure it out on my own then ask for help.

Another interesting result was related to the following question:

Would you rather have a teacher teaching you relatively easy stuff and give you an A- OR a teacher teaching you relatively difficult stuff and give you a B+

H: Depends if she is going to ignore the difficult stuff and then we miss important topics for the next year then I would rather get a B+ and learn the difficult

S: The more difficult it gets the less useful it is, so easy stuff with A-

G: I am not going to become a mathematician I only need to learn the basics so easy with A-

            For H who was preparing to go to university and knew that marks are important to get enrolled she was mature enough to realize that a good grade was not enough if that means she is going to struggle in the future by missing some important concepts. On the other hand, S and G cared about the mark the most because they had different needs and interests and they related to mathematics in a different way.

The idea of different students with different needs appear again here. Not every student wants to “become a mathematician” and not every student finds complex topics in mathematics as “useful.” Hence, when a teacher plans for a lesson she should take students’ different interests into account. A teacher should reach out to all students and make sure that everybody did understand the requirement for their grade level. Yet, at the same time, he/she has to motivate students and set high expectations so they will be pushed to do their best and not just settle with a minimum achievement. Being a good teacher is setting your students for success.