Instructional Design

In second grade literacy instruction, students practice reading comprehension in part through MAZE passages, where they select the word that best completes a sentence based on the meaning of the text.  

Student Reasoning Pattern

• Schema-driven choice – students sometimes select an answer that fits real-world expectations rather than the meaning built across the passage.

• Partial reading – some students focus on the first sentence and do not integrate information from later sentences.

• Ignoring part of speech - some students get distracted by a word whose meaning appears to work but is the incorrect part of speech

Passage Example

The busy Kindergarten room was (fun, loud, quiet) when the principal walked in and got the children's attention.  The students quickly stopped talking (and, or, but) turned to face her.  Soon the room became (focus, calm, loud) as everyone listened.  

They often select "fun" as they know that their Kindergarten class was a lot of fun from their schema.  They often select "focus" because they know they should focus when a Principal comes in, but it is the wrong part of speech.

Instructional Design Response

After observing patterns like this, I began collaborating with AI to design additional MAZE-style passages connected to our Wit and Wisdom and Geodes knowledge building texts.  These passages initially included distractors that reflected common student reasoning patterns, such as relying on familiar associations instead of the textual evidence.  It aligned well with the work we are doing with text structures.  By aligning the passages with Geodes and Wit and Wisdom, the students could use relevant background information while still needing to read multiple sentences carefully to determine the correct answer.  

Reflection

This example showed how often students rely on background knowledge (schema) rather than integrating information across a passage. Designing distractors that reflect common assumptions helps reveal how students are interpreting the text. These observations help guide instruction so students learn to base their answers on evidence from the passage rather than expectations about the situation. 

First grade math lives at the numbers 1-20 for about 75% of the year and then the children learn about counting to and working with 100.  In second grade, we work will adding and subtracting up to 1000.   

Student reasoning patterns observed when introduced:

• Place-value misalignment – digits shift between columns, leading students to add incorrect numbers together.

• Uncertainty about where to begin – some students cannot determine which column to add first, even when the numbers are written correctly.

Instructional Design Response

Scaffold progression

• Notebook paper turned sideways – a common early strategy for helping students align numbers by place value

• Graph paper – a typical next step when students still struggle with column alignment

• Highlighted 3×3 place-value groups – a modification I developed to visually group hundreds, tens, and ones

• Color cues (red → orange → yellow) – an additional scaffold I introduced to help students determine which column to begin with

Reflection

Small changes to the visual structure of the page significantly improved students’ ability to organize multi-digit addition problems. By reducing the visual complexity of the task, students were able to focus on the mathematical reasoning rather than the layout of the numbers.