Math Practices Must be Taught and Practiced

Two weeks ago I gave a quiz on Volumes.

To help prepare students for what's coming down the pipe with the Common Core

I included some open-ended questions with a couple higher level DOK questions.

I reminded the students to show their work and draw out the pictures to help them answer the questions thoroughly.

Some did.

Some did not.

After grading the quizzes and looking at the scores, I realized something was amiss.

For the most part, students sailed through the multiple choice questions.

It was the open ended problems that fell far short.

After some pondering and reflecting,

I realized what the problem was.

Instead of just reminding them about showing their work,

I needed to teach them about a very important math practice...justifying their work.

While we reviewed the quiz, we also refocused on several math practices that could come in handy when solving problems.

1)  Perseverance...Have a plan to get through the quiz.  For this quiz, it included writing the formulas somewhere on the quiz before beginning.  

2)  Justifying...This math practice works for all types of problems.  For multiple choice problems, when you justify your answer by showing your work, you are able to choose the correct answer with confidence.  For the open-ended questions, it is absolutely essential to justify your math logic.  It seemed students wanted to just write down their first gut instinct on what they THOUGHT was the solution to the problem.  It was more of a hypothesis than an explanation of how they arrived at the solution.  By showing their work, they can justify their math argument.  

3)  Precision...Precision to units of measure.  Precision of solutions (rounding is okay is some situations, however, attention to decimals gets us closer to an exact answer).  

In summary, if we don't teach students these all important math practices,

We will be doing a disservice to our students when they are faced with the open-ended problems of the new CCS assessments in two years.

Students need practice so that these math practices do indeed become math habits.