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How do you support high school students with Math and STEM subjects?

What do you offer for visual learners for STEM readiness prior and during high school?

What is the problem with taking it easy, and the "C get degrees" attitudes?

By lowering performance standards, these students risk disqualifying themselves from competitive graduate programs and professional paths where they would otherwise collaborate with intellectual peers.

If a student is fully satisfied with their undergraduate degree as their final academic milestone, this strategy poses little threat. However, for those whose primary fulfillment relies on remaining embedded within a community of high-achieving peers, underperformance creates profound uncertainty about where their academic path will terminate and whether they will regret their eventual professional placement.

If one views college strictly as a final destination, then settling for minimum effort isn't a problem. But if the ultimate goal is to build a career surrounded by like-minded, high-achieving peers, this attitude blurs the student's future path.

The risk is ending up in professional settings that leave the student feeling unfulfilled, isolated, and misplaced.

Solutions before high school:

Students are empowered when the basic learning concepts relating to their academic path are solid. One possible strategy is "life crafting".

The best time to evolve a skill is before the stakes are high, to build an intuitive foundation years ahead of formal courses. By using life crafting, the student intentionally curates timelines, environment, and activities. This transforms a high-stress academic requirement into the natural next step of an ongoing hobby or extracurricular.

When you introduce subjects early through low-pressure extracurricular, you bypass the typical "shock" students experience when they first encounter advanced coursework, such as Chemistry 20 or Physics 20.

Example, Chemistry:

Alberta's grade 9 Chemistry offers a surprisingly deep look into core scientific topics. Building this foundational knowledge early is a key stepping stone for students targeting future careers in engineering and professional disciplines.

A robust understanding of Chemistry opens doors to prestigious career pathways, including engineering and advanced professional degrees.

Example, Chemistry UofC admission:

Click here to see an admissions example.

After reading the example, it becomes clear that students need intentionality to be admitted, courses must be selected cleverly so that extra courses like Math 31 can be fitted during high school to increase the likelihood of acceptance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gifted Education, HS

Q: How do you support high school students with Math and STEM subjects?

High school students are more adaptable than younger students and are ready to engage in more traditional learning forms in preparation for their various exams. In this case the focus is on providing as many examples and problem solving techniques as possible.

When time allows it, we categorize problems into separate "families" of techniques, and help students learn to identify which question falls into which category. 

Direct instruction is sometimes required for select chapters before intense tutorials can begin. 

Students are asked to learn and then state solution strategies before diving in to solve, they provide these verbally. This habit ensures a true understanding and readiness of the subject.

One of the greatest problems that high school students have is a gap in their knowledge from previous years. This is the case for all students in general, not only the gifted. It is very difficult to cover all previous math concepts if the student was not interested in STEM before and missed out on the basics. Most often this pertains to operations with fractions and concepts relating to equations. 

Our team has developed a series of short quizzes (2-5 minutes long) the students can opt to answer before their tutoring sessions, which allows us to discover problem areas and design corrective measures to resolve the gaps. The student then watches an equally short presentation that explains the missed concept. They take the quiz again until they improve their score. 

While initially this seems like a slow process, results are seen exponentially in a few weeks as students get a hang of the majority of the topics and do increasingly better. Unfortunately, for many students working on high school classes, going back to early concepts is extremely demoralizing and can contribute to exam anxiety, bad grades and bad feelings about their learning. This incremental approach integrates in their current learning and is seen as a small preparation before the lesson and doesn't get the negative response that fully fleshed out lessons do. 

Q: What do you offer for visual learners for STEM readiness prior and during high school?

Grades 9 and 10 science is the gateway to success in level 20 and 30 courses in grades 11 and 12. We have a wide collection of worksheets that help construct a comprehensive drill to address many typical STEM questions. 

For example, we use the following worksheets to prepare for Atomic Theory required in chemistry with grade 9 and 10 students:

Atomic Theory Worksheet.

The resources we use are often available digitally for free.

In this example we address the Particle Model of Matter described in the Alberta curriculum for grade 10 science. The Particle Model is the foundation of chemistry and is a prerequisite for understanding Chem 20, Chem 30 and university courses such as Chem 201 and Chem 203.

We also have numerous presentations the students can watch on their own to extend their knowledge after class. They can then bring prioritized questions that they could not resolve, which gets the best from their tutoring sessions.

We use books that are very heavy on the visualization of the atom and its subatomic particles for the visual learner. An example is shown below. The book has lots of answered questions and supports independent study as well.

To make it more interesting, students also learn how to use digital tools such as MolView to build molecules, visualize and better understand chemical bonding.

This is a popular tool among university students studying chemistry and biology. See for example the web pages constructed for the organic chemistry course at the University of Calgary here. The web page uses "JSMol" structures which can be built with MolView to depict molecules. These are good alternates for the Molymod Kit when sessions are delivered remotely instead of in person.

Younger students can have fun and familiarize themselves with a tool that will serve them well in the future, and the level of complexity can be easily tweaked for their age.

Many of our students began playing with this tool and ended up recognizing numerous molecules based on their 3D appearance. It is fun to see students use the tool to look up what various compounds look like. This results in a great enthusiasm for chemistry.