Student Work 1

My sample of student work comes from a second grade female student named “Jane”.  The second graders in my class are reviewing (some learning for the first time) how to tell time on an analog clock.  The artifact I’ll reference is a homework sheet that asked students to draw the hour and minute hand on six clocks with a given time, and tell what time it is from three clocks that are filled out.  The first clock on the page asks for the hands to be drawn to show 9:00.  This clock, as an example/reference, also has the minutes labeled outside the clock (ex: 00 above the 12, 05 above the 1). 

              Jane drew the hands correctly on the first six clock problems, but then recorded the time incorrectly on the three problems where she had to look at the hands to tell what the time was.  Interestingly enough, she recorded all the minutes correctly with just the hour hand off by 1.  The strategy that she used for finding the minutes is clear when looking at all the clocks on the page.  She used jumping arches from number to number on the clock to count by 5’s.  Drawing these lines is the strategy my mentor has been working with them on and proved to be effective for Jane in all nine problems on the page.  These examples show me that she has a strength and understanding of the fact that there is 5 minutes represented between two numbers on an analog clock.  However, just from looking at this sheet that remains an assumption because of the example clock I mentioned above.  Though I can see the made the arches to assume she counted by 5’s on her own, I do not know for certain (considering the sheet was done at home) that she didn’t just look at the example to give her the adequate hand to draw.  She may understand that we count by 5’s to find what goes in the minutes, but not actually comprehend that it represents five minutes of passing time within an hour.   However, one concept I observe that Jane shows full understanding of is the difference in lengths between the minute and hour hands.  She clearly shows one long and one short when depicting the time in the given problems with no confusion.

              Another interesting part of Jane’s responses that I mentioned briefly above, is that she interpreted the hour hand on the last three clocks consistently an hour before what is correct.  For example, the first clock depicts 11:15 and she responded 12:15, the second clock depicts 4:45 and she responded 5:45.  I have two initial thoughts on why Jane possibly did this.  First, the minutes in the examples isn’t at the “top of the hour position” so since the hands are already drawn in properly, the hour hand falls between two numbers rather than pointing exactly to one (how a child would draw 9:45, with the hour hand exactly on the 9).  When first teaching students time, the hands point exactly to the numbers 1-12 and any conception of “in-between” is absent initially.  So, this is a logical source of confusion for a young learner who is just getting used to telling time.  I believe that Jane was confused which number to depict as the hour because it was not pointing to just one.  This then lead her to choose the number it hadn’t reached yet making her responses 1 hour early.  My second thought pertains to why she would choose the number the hand hadn’t reached yet versus the number it had just passed.  It is possible that Jane doesn’t understand that as time passes on an analog clock, the hands move around to the right in a clockwise motion.  My students haven’t been exposed to manipulating a clock themselves yet.  Instead my mentor’s focus for them right now is to just be able to read/draw given times on a clock.  This leads me to believe that Jane has some confusion about how a clock actually operates signaling that she may not be comprehending “what time it is” at all. 

              To be able to advance Jane’s thinking I would first and foremost need to ask her to explain why she completed the problems in the way that she did.  I would need to know what her thought process was in writing the hands the way she did to really know what misconceptions she has.  Since this assignment was completed for homework I am unsure.  The next advancement I could make would be to actually start using clock manipulatives to model and show consistently that in a given hour the hour hand moves between two numbers and to the right.  I would show her that (in 1 hour) while the minute hand moves all the way around once, the hour hand only moves slightly and that all the minutes within that one cycle pertain to the number it has passed, even if the hand is closest to the next number on the clock.