Opportunities for reasoning matter. Students need math to be more than a race to find answers to other people’s questions.
How to create those opportunities? We worked with Dan Meyer and the team at Desmos to develop activities for students to learn how graphs work. You can check out the activities here.
Great activities are a place to start. How students experience those activities makes all the difference. We worked with instructors to leverage the activities to notice the richness of students’ reasoning, rather than to fill in gaps in students’ graph accuracy. We developed facilitation guides to help with this.
We found that opportunities for reasoning impacted students’ attitudes toward math. In particular, we found statistically significant differences in students’ perceived competence. And the opportunities impacted students’ performance on the final exam.
Want to know more? Read our conference paper for #PMENA19
