2 What is it that students don’t understand?

Identifying what tricky topics exist in any particular subject area can be very difficult, even for teachers who appear to understand their students’ learning needs in great detail. Teachers often feel frustrated when trying to understand their students’ difficulties, saying:

Figure 1 (repeated from Week 1) I don’t understand

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Image of a woman with her hands on her head as if tearing her hair out alongside the text ‘I don’t understand why they don’t understand’. Showing the frustration teachers sometimes feel when they just cannot get their students to grasp a tricky topic.

Figure 1 (repeated from Week 1) I don’t understand

Through the work with teachers, the tricky topics that drills down to the causes of student misconceptions and helps teachers target their teaching interventions so that they make a difference. The first step in this process is to work out what it is that the students are struggling to understand. This can be done through a ‘needs analysis’.