If you have ever taught slope to your student before, you have no doubt felt the mind-numbing frustration of watching your students struggle on such a simple task.
“It’s just counting!” I would always lament. “How can you not count?”
While this sentiment does miss the heart of the matter, it is true. Slope involves almost no math outside of counting. So why do they struggle so greatly?
Why They Struggle
One reason they struggle is confusion over the counting. Where do they start? What happens when the intervals change? And then they’re not sure which coordinate to use and what to do when the coordinates are not in the position that they’re used to.
Of course, all of this comes down to simply understanding the concept. If they grasped why they were finding the difference between the two points and what slope truly is, this would simplify.
However, we, as educators, often don’t give the students enough time to grasp the concept. We teach it, model it, and then give them a few practice problems before moving on.
A Remedy
To help your students be successful, slow down. Give them lots of practice on the most basic elements of the skill before moving on to the more difficult concepts (like the slope formula).
Give them lots of practice with immediate feedback they have mastered the concept.
Too often, we show them how to find the slope of a line by counting, and then move on to the trickier or more difficult concepts. Instead, give them lots of practice. Enough for them to truly grasp the skill before moving on.
Also, make sure to give immediate feedback. Immediate feedback is one of the best ways that we learn a new skill. When we complete a problem and immediately know if we have made a mistake, we are able to learn from our mistakes and correct the issue. Or, if we did it correctly, our confidence grows.
Giving immediate feedback is one of five key strategies to help your students master any skill. To learn all five, enroll in my free master class: 5 Strategies to Help Your Students Get It.
Step by Step
Often we teach students how to find the slope of a line, and then move into the slope formula before they have fully grasped the first concept.
This causes confusion, and they start mixing them up because they don’t fully grasp the concepts being taught. If we didn’t progress them until they had a good knowledge of the first strategy, we would see less confusion and greater mastery.
Prerequisite Skills
Students will often struggle with a skill because they lack the prerequisite skills needed to perform that task.
For example, often students can’t do long division because they don’t know their times tables. Or they can’t graph a linear equation because they still don’t know how to calculate slope.
For finding the slope of a line on a coordinate plane, there are very few prerequisite skills needed to master this concept. They can simply count from one coordinate to the other, and then put the rise and run in the appropriate areas of the fraction.
However, when it comes to the slope formula, students often have trouble because they can’t add and subtract integers.
So, I put my students in a skills-based learning station to help them relearn how to add integers and how to subtract integers.
Some Resources to Help Your Students Succeed with Slope
Act it Out
One of my favorite activities to do with slope is to draw a giant coordinate plane on the floor. This can be done outside with sidewalk chalk or inside with masking tape. Then we use objects, or students, to be the points on the grid and we walk the slope.
Shoot the Aliens
This is a fun worksheet to help students practice the skill in a creative way. Click here to preview it.
Maze Worksheets
Another fun worksheet that has the nice benefit of providing immediate feedback. Since students will not complete the maze if they are answering the questions incorrectly.
Click here to preview Maze Worksheets for Slope.
Reteach Worksheets
These worksheets do a great job of guiding students through the process of learning the skill. If you have students who are struggling to learn slope, give them these worksheets and let them work through it.
Click here to preview the reteach worksheets
Skills Based Learning Station
The most effective way to help your students master the skill is to put them in a skills based learning station, where they will be re-taught the skill and be given lots of practice with immediate feedback.
I have all the resources in one download for you if you would like to implement a slope learning station in your class.
Click here to preview the slope learning station.
