The student work I brought in was on the topic of mean, median, mode and range. The student is a middle level student they tend to struggle with first instruction but then pick it up after a few examples and individual practice. The student did a very interesting thing, after she read through her data she re-wrote the numbers in numerical order but then she did something I do not think any other student did. She circled the numbers that related to either mean, median, mode and or range and wrote how she would use them. So, for example for the median she an inclusive line that bubbled under each of the numbers then wrote, add up and divide by number of values for mean. Then she circled the lowest number and wrote lowest number, so she would remember to use that number for range. She continued to do this for each number that was required in a step.
This amazed me because normally this student has a habit of not showing all of their work however, this time they went above and beyond and label the necessary numbers. When I asked the student about why they did what they had done they said "I wanted to make sure I used the right numbers and not just any number in the line so I showed what each number was so I would know". This made me see that this student is very much a visual learner and needs to see things written out clearly for them to be able to solve or analyze it. I was happy to see that this particular student worked to find a solution on their own and did not just continue to use what ever number they felt they wanted when trying to find an answer.
After reviewing this students work and discussing it with other interns in class I realized that the next step would be to make sure that the data I give them represents numbers from the real world for example, temperatures to make sure that they are seeing how this could be used in real life and not just "some pointless calculation". I also would make sure that when I gave them the set of data it was all jumbled up and not in numerical order so I could weed out the kids who actually know how to find the median versus being lucky because the numbers were already put in order.
This is a very nice example. I think the natural extension would be to give the student in this example the opportunity to share his/her strategy with the rest of the class, and to have other students their strategies as well. This would be a natural opportunity for student-to-student interactions.
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