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Asia-Pacific Forum on Science Learning and Teaching, Volume
7, Issue 2, Article 8 (Dec., 2006) Tin-Lam TOH A survey on the teaching of relative velocity and
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6. Some Implications for Teaching of Relative Velocity
Rosenthal Effect was being mentioned in the preceding paragraphs. It is thus important that the teachers orientate their pupils in the correct frame of mind before teaching this topic, as a teacher in class is the role model and should avoid instilling in the pupils the idea that this topic is difficult for most pupils or unimportant for examination purposes if he wants to ensure pupils learn this particular topic well.
Another problem that was highlighted was that many of these concepts are science related. Thus, some form of interdisciplinary effort could be made between the mathematics and science departments in aligning the science and mathematics subjects in the secondary schools, especially in delivering the concepts involving kinematics, especially displacements and velocities.
It is interesting to note that scale drawing is practically not emphasized in learning relative velocity. The use of scale drawing in solving problems involving relative velocity helps pupils save significant effort in trigonometric and geometric computations and is particularly useful for students who are weaker in geometry and trigonometry.
The use of IT can be used to help pupils visualize related concepts on relative velocity, which is going back to the basics of this chapter in the sense of enhancing pupils’ understanding of mathematical concepts. Many concepts, which otherwise need tedious mathematical computations, can be illustrated and visualized almost intuitively with the use of IT (Toh, 2003). Thus, in this sense, the use of IT can serve more as getting the basics right than as enrichment activity.
