Teaching Reflection for CA 4.4B

Mairead's Reflection:

We made significant changes to this activity this year and I think that this was a good thing, however I still don't think it gets at the main problem which is that at least half the class does not understand that the process they are completing is finding a model for the original data and why. I'm not sure what lack of understanding is at the heart of this but it's definitely there. They did pretty well going through this activity until the last question where some students still did not understand that they needed to be checking all three graphs and seeing which was most linear before continuing and then a lot of students didn't understand that they should be plotting the model against the original data. I don't know if giving them the original data in the first two questions and asking them to check their models at the end would help? (We did this together as a class this time but I'm not sure alot of them were paying attention enough to actually get what we were doing.) Or to make more of a point of that somehow - maybe making the whole thing less guided would help as they would have to think through it more at the beginning instead of just following the process....

They worked on this activity very independently and then I went around helping students as they ran into trouble - we spent two days on it all together.