At a middle school in California, the state testing in math was underway via the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) exam. A girl pointed to the problem on the computer screen and asked “What do I do?” The proctor read the instructions for the problem and told the student: “You need to explain how you got your answer.”
The girl threw her arms up in frustration and said, “Why can’t I just do the problem, enter the answer and be done with it?”
The answer to her question comes down to what the education establishment believes “understanding” to be, and how to measure it. K-12 mathematics instruction involves equal parts procedural skills and understanding. What “understanding” in mathematics means, however, has long been a topic of debate. One distinction popular with today’s math-reform advocates is between “knowing” and “doing.” A student, reformers argue, might be able to “do” a problem (i.e., solve it mathematically) without understanding the concepts behind the problem-solving procedure. Perhaps he or she has simply memorized the method without understanding it and is performing the steps by “rote.”
One distinction is between “knowing” and “doing.”
The Common Core math standards, adopted in 42 states and the District of Columbia and reflected in Common Core-aligned tests like the SBAC and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC), take understanding to a whole new level. “Students who lack understanding of a topic may rely on procedures too heavily,” states the Common Core website. “But what does mathematical understanding look like?” And how can teachers assess it?
One way is to ask the student to justify, in a way that is appropriate to the student’s mathematical maturity, why a particular mathematical statement is true, or where a mathematical rule comes from.
The underlying assumption here is that if a student understands something, he or she can explain it—and that deficient explanation signals deficient understanding. But this raises yet another question: What constitutes a satisfactory explanation?
While the Common Core leaves this unspecified, current practices are suggestive. Consider a problem that asks how many total pencils there are if five people have three pencils each. In the eyes of some educators, explaining why the answer is 15 by stating, simply, that 5 x 3 = 15 is not satisfactory. To show they truly understand why 5 x 3 is 15, and why this computation provides the answer to the given word problem, students must do more. For example, they might draw a picture illustrating five groups of three pencils. (And in some instances, as was the case recently in a third-grade classroom, a student would be considered to not understand if he or she drew three groups of five pencils.)
Consider now a problem given in a pre-algebra course that involves percentages: “A coat has been reduced by 20 percent to sell for $160. What was the original price of the coat?”
A student may show the solution as follows:
x = original cost of coat in dollars 100% – 20% = 80% 0.8x = $160 x = $200
Clearly, the student knows the mathematical procedure necessary to solve the problem. In fact, for years students were told not to explain their answers, but to show their work, and if presented in a clear and organized manner, the math contained in this work was considered to be its own explanation. But the above demonstration might, through the prism of the Common Core standards, be considered an inadequate explanation. That is, inspired by what the standards say about understanding, one could ask “Does the student know why the subtraction operation is done to obtain the 80 percent used in the equation or is he doing it as a mechanical procedure—i.e., without understanding?”
In a middle school observed by one of us, the school’s goal was to increase student proficiency in solving math problems by requiring students to explain how they solved them. This was not required for all problems given; rather, they were expected to do this for two or three problems in class per week, which took up to 10 percent of total weekly class time. They were instructed on how to write explanations for their math solutions using a model called “Need, Know, Do.” In the problem example given above, the “Need” would be “What was the original price of the coat?” The “Know” would be the information provided in the problem statement, here the price of the discounted coat and the discount rate. The “Do” is the process of solving the problem.
Students were instructed to use “flow maps” and diagrams to describe the thinking and steps used to solve the problem, after which they were to write a narrative summary of what was described in the flow maps and elsewhere. They were told that the “Do” (as well as the flow maps) explains what they did to solve the problem and that the narrative summary provides the why. Many students, though, had difficulty differentiating the “Do” section from the final narrative. But in order for their explanation to qualify as “high level,” they couldn’t simply state “100% – 20% = 80%”; they had to explain what that means. For example, they might say, “The discount rate subtracted from 100 percent gives the amount that I pay.”
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