Ida Case 1
From TeacherWiki
Overview:
- Students complete a problem set on the computer
- Study the Item report from the Problem set to find one problem to deal with
- Discuss the problem in class
- Retest the students on a similar problem in the computer lab.
- Meet individually in the lab with the students who did not do the problem correctly on the retake.
Contents |
Day 1
In early October I took my students to the ASSISTment lab and I had them do the Bits and Pieces Investigation 2 problem set. Then I looked at the item report to find a problem that I wanted to respond to. I have found that it is less overwhelming to just focus on one problem in depth instead of trying to react to everything in the problem set. I decided to focus on the problem that the most students got wrong, see figure 1.
| ASSISTment Item 24274 |
| Peanuts cost $1.98 per pound. If you buy .38 pounds of peanuts how much will it cost? Round to the nearest penny. |
As you can see from figure 2 70% of my students needed help from the ASSISTments program to get this problem correct. I decided that with so many confused students I should address this problem in class.
| 70% of students (14) only got the problem correct after looking at the hint. |
| 30% of students (6) did not need a hint to get the problem correct. |
Day 2
I was very concerned about he 14 students who were not able to do this problem on their own. So I wrote this new problem, figure 3, and we discussed it in class for 15 minutes:
| If Butter costs 1.98 per pound and you buy .87 pounds how much will it cost? |
We had a good discussion. Many students thought they had to divide 1.98 ÷ .87 to get the answer. I immediately thought to change the problem again to finding .5 pounds of butter since .5 or ½ is much easier to manipulate mentally than .87 for my students. So we discussed finding .5 of 1.98 by finding ½ of 1.98 or .5*1.98. This also gave us an estimate of the answer and a realization that our answer to the problem with .87 pounds should be somewhere between .99 and 1.98. All in all it was an interesting discussion and helped my students work through some of their misunderstandings.
Day 3
Since we were returning to the computer lab I decided to make an ASSISTment myself that was similar to the one given on Day 1. You can see the problem I wrote in Figure 4. I used the ASSISTment builder and the Problem Set builder to do this. Then I assigned the new problem set to my classes and asked the students to do that problem set before getting to work on my other ASSISTment assignments. Since the students did this problem first I was able to see find their work right away on their papers when they turned them in. I was very interested in seeing what sort of work was done by both groups of students, those who got it correct and those who got it wrong.
| ASSISTment Item 30509 |
| Gas costs $2.63 a gallon. How much would it cost to buy .33 gallons? Give your answer in dollars and round to the nearest cent. |
Figure 5 shows the results from the students second attempt at this problem.
| 35% of students (7) only got the problem correct after looking at the hint. |
| 65% of students (13) did not need a hint to get the problem correct. |
I was please when I looked at the papers for the 13 students who got the problem correct without a hint. They did an excellent job of showing their work (I am so glad I spent the time at the beginning of the year teaching my students how to record their work in an organized manner in the computer lab). Now I just needed to reach the 7 students who not only needed the hint but they did not demonstrate good understanding of multiplication on their papers. I wanted to find time to discuss this problem individually with these 7 students. I decided to do this at our next visit to the ASSISTment lab since the rest of the class would be occupied using the ASSITments.
Day 4
In the ASSISTment lab I sat with a printout of the gasoline problem number 30509 and the student work from Day 3 for the 7 students. I called each of the 7 students up individually and showed them the problem and the work they did. I then asked the student to work on the problem again. It was very important for me to listen to their misconceptions of the problem and help them recall our discussion in class and to make sense of this situation. I particularly emphasized estimation as a way to make sense of this problem.
Conclusion
I enjoyed using the data I collected to drive my instruction and motivate my students. In conclusion this is how I used the ASSISTments:
- Day 1: I was able to identify a skill directly tied to our schools curriculum that my students were having trouble with.
- Day 2: I then went back to my classroom and re-taught this skill.
- Day 3: I used the system to put in a new question into my ASSISTment assignments, and had my student try that, and I found that have 50% of the students having trouble improved.
- Day 4: I then targeted the students who did not improve with individual instruction while the rest of the class was using the ASSISTments.
