this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
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This is one of those problems that makes more sense with context. The teacher had the students working on "reasonableness", which is essentially "does the question I'm asking make sense?". The students were probably instructed to ignore actually trying to solve the problem when presented with one, but instead explain why the question either does or doesn't make sense.
In this case the student potentially misunderstood the task. The failure on the teacher's part is wording the question in such a way that it actually has a reasonable solution, and isn't necessarily an unreasonable question.
The feedback should look totally different if that was the case though
The teacher doesn't need to write all of that to get the point across. They can speak to them on the side and say, "remember when we worked on reasonableness last Tuesday?"
I’m a teacher myself so I fully get how that can be done. But the written feedback is still very, very off if the assignement is what you said it is.
Honestly looks way more like a teacher who is a bit to rigged in their thinking and just got it wrong. I know plenty of those!
This isn’t testing reasonableness. This is testing to see if a student understands that to properly compare fractions the wholes have to start as equivalent.
Source: I use questions similar to this every year because if I don’t get some real funky diagrams.
But.. you can totally compare fractions without the whole being equivalent. You just have to know the size of the wholes. It's just a poorly phrased question that has more than one correct answer when only one was intended.
Edit: also, it's totally testing reasonableness, that's literally the title of the question. Still poorly phrased though.
9 and 10 year olds lack the understanding or ability adjust for differently sized wholes.
Ok, I misspoke when I said it’s not testing for reasonableness. It’s what I get for commenting right after waking up. The reasonableness it’s checking for is can the students understand what makes the situation true. That the wholes are different sized. It’s not a poorly worded problem, the teacher just doesn’t know what they are doing.
Source: again, I teach this scenario every year and the students figure it out every year.
Sorry I'm still trying to get my head around the question. What is the answer the teacher expected/ the question the teacher meant to ask? 🤔
It makes more sense when you remove the fractions, but I assume they were working on them.
It's easier this way: "John ate 4 slices of pizza. Dave ate 5 slices of pizza. John ate more slices of pizza than Dave. How is this possible?"
The answer they're looking for is: "This is not possible because 5 slices of pizza is more than 4 slices of pizza."
It's a really bizarre question, and is poorly worded, but the concept could be really important depending on the age/ability of the student.
It's like teaching a kid to fact check I guess.
Oh wow. I love questions asking how when the answer is it's not ... Thank you for the explanation 😅