Jack Case 1
From TeacherWiki
Descripton
This is a story about responding to data collected on ASSISTment. The students in this story did their ASSISTment work in the lab but it does not matter how the data was collected, in class or at home.
Overview:
- Review the item report from a problem set and find an area of weakness.
- Develop an in-class activity that addresses that weakness. In this case, the activity involved asking students to compose questions that could be posed from a situation. This was in contrast to what the ASSISTments did, which was to give a situation and then ask the students to answer questions.
Contents |
Day 1
I have been working on linear equations with my students in class. When I took them to the lab this week I gave them the Moving Straight Ahead Investigation 2 quiz. Once I looked at the results on the item report, I noticed that for my Purple class only half of them were able to do problems 13101 and 13103 correctly. You can see these problems and two others in Figure 1 and the results in Figure 2. These problems came in a set of 4 where the situation was the same for all of them but the 4 questions were all a bit different.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Day 2
A few days later in class I decided to revisit this problem. In this instance, I wanted to encourage a discussion in class, so I felt that it would be better if I came up with an open ended question for this problem instead of just doing the same problems again. I decided to show the students the situation again and ask them to come up with questions that could be asked about this situation. It took them a while to get what I was trying to do but once one student came up with an example many others followed suit.
Once we had a student initiated question I had the class answer it. I also made a point of using the words coefficient and y-intercept because this is what they had such a hard time with on the initial quiz. You can see in Figure 3 the questions they came up with.
Questions for the situation
Ming is saving money to buy a bike. Her grandparents gave her some money to start her savings. She will also be saving half her allowance each week. This equation shows the S dollars she has after w weeks:
S = 30 + 5w
Figure 3
After our discussion I showed the students the actual questions from the ASSISTments and we discussed the answers to those.
Conclusion
I found a weakness in my students' work and then I addressed it in class and was able to make a new question that involved higher order thinking and prepared them to really understand their mistakes on the original problem.
