Behrman_Student Work

On Friday I gave my students their summative assessment for my subtraction unit. My unit was adapted from our GO MATH curriculum, and although I liked most of their chapter test, I disliked how students were never given the opportunity to show their work and generate their  own answer. All of the word problems simply had students bubble in an answer from the presented options. Therefore, I decided to modify the final two word problems so that students were not only required to show their work, but also produce an answer without being able to compare it to the list of possible answers. One of the subtraction word problems involved comparing with an unknown quantity. The problem stated, "Mario earned 35 Art Bucks at After-School. He has 6 more Art Bucks than Alessandra. How many Art Bucks does Alessandra have?"

This student, Hector*, exemplifies a common misunderstanding I observed when grading these tests. He drew 35 Art Bucks to represent what Mario has, and then added an additional six Art Bucks to find what Alessandra was. This reveals that the Hector (and many other students) still need practice with comparing two amounts. One next step I plan on taking with him, as well as my class, is to practice with some hands on examples between two students. I will distribute the same number of bingo chips to two students and have them color in on a piece of graph paper how many they have. Then, I will tell one of the students to take 4 more bingo chips from the bag, and color those in a different color on the graph. This will visually help students to see/count how many more the second child has. Also, it will allow us to discuss what the term "more" means and when we hear it used (I need more time, I want more juice, etc), so that students recognize more=the number is increasing (adding). Thus, if someone has more than you, he/she has a bigger number than you. To find out what you have, you would have to subtract.

Even more interesting with Hector's test is the answer he generated after counting up his drawn figures: 52. With Hector, in particular, I would like to sit down with him and have explain to me what his drawing shows and watch him count them to see if he is still struggling with one-to-one correspondence or is skipping numbers when counting. Since most of my students are ELLs, they sometimes skip numbers or say them out of order since they aren't as exposed to these number words in English.