"Tell me and I'll forget: show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand."
-Chinese Proverb
Engaging and Motivating Students
Since the beginning of my internship, my primary goal has been to increase the amount of homework my students turn in on a regular basis. As I saw very early on, the main reason for students' poor grades was due to the small amount of homework they were turning in. The classroom grading policy says that 40% of the marking period grade is based on homework. Therefore, when students do not complete homework, this grade suffers, and most likely, their quiz and test grades will also suffer. I have used several motivational tools to do so, to try and extrinsically motivate my students to do homework. For example, I was using "homework passes" which students could earn with an 80% on a test, or by turning in 10 homework assignments on time. However, as the year wore on, I saw that these methods to extrinsically motivate my students were falling short of their goal: to increase the number of students turning in homework. Thus, the aim of this project is to intrinsically motivate students through various classroom activities and lessons with conceptual foundations. I'm hoping that by involving the students in creating the mathematics in this unit, their motivation and engagement will increase, resulting in a higher number of homework assignments turned in, and ultimately a better understanding of the concepts.