Behrman_Student work

This example of student work was a homework sheet where students were directed to break apart the number they were subtracting into tens and ones. Since some students had struggled with a similar activity previously, I hand-wrote an example of how students were to break the number down at the top for clarification. However, this student's sheet shows two possible areas of difficulty that resulted in her poor performance on this homework task. One possibility is that she was confused by the directions and would have benefited from additional examples, including an additional modeled example prior to passing out the homework.

Another possibility is that she is confused about strategies for breaking down numbers. Previously we have talked in class about breaking down numbers into making friendly numbers (when the subtrahend is a single digit number). Now that we are using two-digit numbers, the focus is on breaking them into tens and ones in order to more quickly use mental math (or number lines or hundreds charts) to solve the problem. Even if she was focused on breaking down only the number in the ones place, many of these numbers are not accurate ways to break the number down.

One next step for me would be to talk with this student and have her discuss her strategy breaking down numbers. Sometimes she attempted to break the two-digit number down and sometimes only the number in the ones place, so I would like to know how she decided which number to break down. A second step would be for her work with this same type of activity but use coins to show me how she would break this down. By using this visual representation, I think that she would be able to more accurately and confidently break down a number in tens and ones. Also, it would give her a real context to apply this concept to and a chance to continue practicing it beyond this one assignment.