More Errors Reflection

The error analysis activity was really an interesting activity to look at. It piggy packed on some of the same ideas we discussed previously in the NAEP project. Often times it was difficult to understand what the child was doing incorrectly without having them there in front of us to ask, "where did you get your answer?" Many times it was very difficult to tell what pattern the students were following. As a teacher I could see myself overlooking many of these patterns and simply marking them as incorrectly and it is easy to me to see why these types of process errors often go unnoticed. Many teachers do not take the time to stop and truly analyze where the students is coming up with these solutions. It shows how important it is for us as future educators to be vigilant of our student's work. Students expressing these kinds of patterns and errors in their work would have to be re-taught those math skills, it would be just like them learning a whole new math concept and have to forget everything they thought they had previously learned. One other thing I found interesting about this activity is our difficulty expressing in words what the student was doing wrong. We could identify the problem but then have a whole new challenge of putting the error into words. Sometimes, that was an extremely difficult process. To us, what these students had done incorrectly made no sense, we had to change our way of thinking in order to do so. However, in the students mind the correct way of solving the problem was the incorrect way. I imagine that a student being told to change their way of thinking in order to find the correct solution would feel similar to them. I think that the difficulties and challenges we felt when learning to do math their way is something we should all make note of and remember when teaching a student that, 'just doesn't get it.'