Today she gave a district made quiz. The first question said "Find the area of the triangle." There was a picture under the question that looked like this:
The students proceeded to find the area of a parallelogram because that is what they had just been working on. But it makes no sense because the picture is of a triangle. Why can't they read the directions? How do you get students to follow directions because on the MSP in spring they will not be able to get help from the teacher?
This seems so basic doesn’t it? I might suggest some basic problem solving skills. I remember when learning how to solve story problems, my kids were instructed to underline important information and circle the actual question. They would cross out any unnecessary information in the problem, etc. I would suggest teaching some of these strategies to your students. While this is clearly not a story problem, if they simply underlined the word “area” and circled the word “triangle” they would know that they were supposed to find the area of a triangle. Hopefully the students wouldn’t have to do this for very long before they began to concentrate better on reading the actual problem.
ReplyDeleteThe teacher and I actually used your suggestion. We took a piece of the warm-up time to discuss story problem techniques. After looking at the quizzes that were recently turned in, I saw over half of the students were starting to use this technique. I hope that it sticks and the students start to see how this helps them especially when there are two parts to the question.
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