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The philosopher Socrates was quite fond of asking questions. When having a philosophical debate, he rarely responded to his opponent by asserting counter points or giving a long explanation for why his opponent’s view was incorrect. Instead, he asked questions that would eventually lead his partner to the conclusion that his or her view was wrong.
This process of questioning with the purpose teaching or persuading has become known as the Socratic Method, and I’m a big fan of it. At Test Geek, the Socratic Method is at the core of our teaching philosophy. In my opinion, there is no better teaching method for standardized test preparation. While we obviously don’t have the goal of proving the student wrong, asking good questions can lead the student to the right answer using information he or she already has. Getting better at that process — figuring out how to arrive at an answer using a given set of information — is one of the most important components to improving on standardized tests. As I’ve written many other times in this blog, standardized tests aim to evaluate a student’s ability to reason with information that is given to them, typically requiring only low-level academic abilities. Rarely do hard questions require knowledge only advanced students have. Rather, hard questions typically require basic knowledge but strong reasoning abilities.
Since this ability is inherently baked-in on the test, we as tutors must find a way to get students more comfortable with this kind of reasoning. Asking questions is a good way of doing that. Let’s say a student is struggling with the following math problem:
The square of a given integer x is one fourth of the square of a given integer y. If y=2x, what is x?
At first blush, this problem seems quite hard. More importantly for students, it is almost certainly very different than anything they’ve seen in school. A few good questions should be able to get the ball rolling for most students, though. Here are some questions that I think would probably lead most students to the right answer:
Tutor: Can we write the first part of the question as an equation rather than a word problem?
We can, and most students could probably see that x² = 1/4 y² is equivalent to the first part of the question.
Tutor: Now that we have that equation, how many equations do we have?
With the new equation, we now have two:
x²=1/4y²
y=2x
Tutor: Since we have two equations, is there any way to solve for x or y?
There are two main ways most students know how to solve if there are two equations: substitution and elimination. At this point, the student can likely see that this problem isn’t so different from problems he or she has seen hundreds of times in school and practiced hundreds of times with the tutor. If there are equations with only two variables, we can solve for both. In this case, we need to either square one formula or take the square root of the other, but those are skills most students are already familiar with. The key is that, by asking the right questions, we’ve “translated” this complicated test prep problem into a regular math problem that is much more understandable for the student. The best part is that the student only used information he or she already knew!
In my experience, a student undergoing the process above will learn significantly more than a student who simply watches a teacher work the above problem out on a whiteboard. Significantly more. More importantly, that student will be far more likely to be able to complete the problem on his or her own the next time. Ultimately, that’s the goal of tutoring!
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