Bode Week 5

The sample of student work I examined was actually two student’s work they did on my unit plan assessment. I choose to look at these this assessment because I felt it’d be beneficial to analyze the assessments in greater depth while I’m starting to plan my unit. The student on the left is a student that I would classify as a high level mathematic student based on the work I’ve seen them doing in class and the answers/attempts they provided on their assessment. The student on the right is probably between a low and middle level student. I would classify them there because I’ve seen students below them and above them and they show good attempts to answer the questions with writing the number values and spelling the coin names. The student on the left named all the coins correctly and attempted to spell them correctly. This student sounded the words out as best they could and it was clear for me to read. They got all the number values correct when answering what the values for each coin was. This student even used the money notation for each question. For the last question this student was able to write down the correct amounts for a nickel and a penny but just didn’t write what that added up to. This shows me that early the student didn’t have enough time to add them together or that sine it was in a word problem maybe they struggled adding it together. Now looking at the student on the right, you can see that the student was trying to write letters for the first question to answer the names of the coins and for the second question they wrote numbers down. Although the letters they wrote seem to have no connection to the coin names, it shows me that they at least recognized that I was asking them for the name not the value, which some other students were not able to do. So the student can understand how they need to answer the question and what is being asked but they struggle to write the letter that could correspond with the coin name (like writing a q to acknowledge it’s a quarter). There is a gap in this student’s understanding of what money values exist (5, 10, 25, 1, etc) and how not just any number can have a coin value. They also struggle with writing their numbers and did not solve the word problem.

If I wanted to advance the student on the left’s thinking I would want to focus on their word problem solving skills. The incorrect spelling of the coins is not as important because I can tell what word they were spelling and how they sounded it out. I would focus on the word problems because this student is very good at understanding the values that need to be added but I’m not quite sure if they are confused how to solve a word problem but they are able to use the correct values so that is a good start for them. I think utilizing and having them create word problems and “number stories” would be good for this student. As for the student on the right, I would focus on the coin names and writing the name or the first letter of the word so that the student gets a better understanding of the name of the coin and being able to connect that with the value. Another way to advance the students thinking is establishing the understanding that the coin values go 1, 5, 10, 25. The values are not random numbers, this could help students be able to learn the values rather than guessing what number the coin equals. Looking ahead on my unit plan it is going to be interesting working with a very wide range of student level ability but scaffolding like I have mentioned will be vital for the students benefit.