March Journal Summary #2

The second article that I reviewed was found in the Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School and was titled The Value of Guess and Check. The author states that guessing and checking encourages the development of problem-solving skills by forcing students to try and make sense of the material involved. Having the students gain a better understanding of quantitative relationship is also one of the main goals shown throughout the article. Word problems can never be underestimated while students are learning new concepts. By giving the students the opportunity to guess and check helps them look deeper into the problem and eventually understand it more. Eventually, the goal is to have the students not go through the process of guessing and checking each time a problem comes about, instead they will know how to go about the problem faster and more efficiently. This will not only help the students learn more material in a shorter amount of time, but will give the teacher more time to look at and help students in problem areas. “Guess and check is a powerful problem-solving strategy that can connect a conceptual understanding of word problems with a symbolic representation” (Guerrero, 398).

The value of guessing and checking has always been important to me. Through my educational career I made use of the guess and check method on many occasions. I have learned that by guessing and checking I look deeper into a problem and it helps me understand it more fully. This is an aspect that I would like to incorporate in my own classroom someday. The more a student looks into a problem, whether it is a number problem or a word problem, will be better for them in the end. Hopefully, as my students travel through their academic careers they won’t have to guess and check as much as they did when they first started out. My reasoning behind this is that they understand how to go about a problem quicker and more efficiently. There is a strong possibility that this method will be incorporated in my teaching atmosphere in the future.

Guerrero, S. M. (2010). The Value of Guess and Check. Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School. Volume 15, Issue 7, (392-398).

http://www.nctm.org/eresources/view_media.asp?article_id=9176