April Journal Summary #2

Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School. Map Scale, Proportion, and Google Earth. By: Martin Roberge and Linda Cooper

This article talks about how children are able to at a young age realize the relationship between things on a map and their actual size. However, only 23% of middle school students could correctly find the distance between two cities on a map. They believe there is this gap because there is so much focus on just setting up the proportions and not realizing what they are representing. Teachers should focus students' attention on the context of the problem so they can develop an understanding of the relationship between values in a proportion. They had students take aerial maps and find ratios and scales for them. The students looked at baseball fields and football fields. They then extended their map scales to creating proportions. They then wanted students to apply map scale within a proportion to explore new situations. The teacher then placed numerous aerial pictures of famous landforms and asked different questions about the pictures. This activity really helps students to understand the relationship between values as they construct proportions.

I found this article really interesting because I have worked with Google Earth before. Since the teacher got their aerial shots from Google Earth I was interested in how they used them. I also think making the students work through proportions and map scale this way would be very beneficial. I think in math we tend to just give students equations and things to plug different numbers into that they do not understand why they are doing it. By having the students figure out the map scale on their own first, they are able to then understand why we make proportions and where they come from. If students understand where the proportions are coming from hopefully they would be less likely to make mistakes in their scaling. Hopefully we could increase that 23% who do it correctly to about 50%. An adaptation I would maybe make to this activity is to let the students use Google Earth themselves and pick a picture to scale on their own. This way they could know another use of technology and explore a little more on computers.