A Cognitive-based Tool to Teach how to Teach

Abstract

One of the most difficult subjects that children have to tackle in school is Mathematics. The intrinsic difficulty of this subject does not only appear in advanced courses. In fact, it appears at the very beginning and comprises the entire primary school career, as it is stated in [1]. In [1] the authors found that the most difficult domain when learning Mathematics is problem solving, together with fractions, division, numerical proportions, scale and space. In [2] the authors propose a classification that distinguishes four subtypes of mathematical learning difficulties: core number, memory (retrieval and processing), reasoning, and visual-spatial. Thus, Mathematics obtains very early the bad reputation of being a hard subject. This reputation is a great handicap in the medium and long term, because it creates a negative feedback and students convince themselves that they cannot handle the subject since it is too hard.