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Research Project
Research Project
TE 855, Michigan State University
Maggie Maiville
Fall 2021
Procedure
Procedure
Project Development: Using inspiration from the book Routines for Reasoning: Fostering Mathematics Practices in All Students (Kelemanik et al., 2016), I developed the focus question: Does providing ask-yourself questions to students impact the way they interact with story problems? Ask-yourself questions are introduced as a strategy to use in the book, where students are requested to ask themselves questions that may help answer story problems. "Ask-yourself questions are used... to help students focus on the avenue of thinking during individual think time and are a tremendous resource for students."
Planning and Setup: I am a private tutor, so this strategy has been applied only to the students who see me for math. This study was done with seven students, as three of my math tutoring students were unable to participate for scheduling reasons. Using a list of ask-yourself questions from Routines for Reasoning, I chose twelve off the list to present to my tutoring students. The questions used in the study are listed below. Students I saw in-person were given a printed out version of the question list and students I saw over Zoom were sent the link to the google doc for them to apply to problems. (The questions are copied and pasted from that google doc; how it looks on this page is how it looked to the students.) I chose two to four story problems for the students to solve. The reason students were given a different number was time-related. The amount of time available to do the study varied from student to student and ranged from 12 to 30 minutes. I picked story problem topics from their math class last year or a topic from earlier this year. Books used for story problems included McDougal Littel Math Course 3, McDougal Littel Geometry, and McDougal Littel Algebra 2.
Instructions Given: The students were asked to try to solve the problems and use the list of questions to help as they went about figuring it out. They were told they didn't have to use all the questions as some might not pertain to the problem. Additionally, they were told that it did not matter if they got an answer to the story problem or not but that attempting the process was the important part.
Interviews: After attempting their assigned story problems, students were interviewed on their experience, focusing on if the questions helped them interact differently with problem-solving. This was followed up with inquiries about if the questions were helpful in other ways. The focus of the research is the relationship between the questions and problem-solving, and not the outcome of the attempted answers. The interview was done in-person (or via Zoom) immediately following the story problem attempts. Those interviews are all posted on their own page (link at the top: "Interviews"). Results are below.
Ask-Yourself Questions for Story Problems
What is this problem about?
What am I trying to figure out?
What am I paying attention to?
What are the important quantities and relationships?
How is this situation behaving?
Does this remind me of another problem situation?
Is there a process that keeps repeating?
What quantity or relationships does this number describe?
How do the quantities relate to each other?
What are the parts or chunks of the process?
Am I counting or calculating in the same way each time?
What operations can I use to model this process?
Results
Results
*See video below for results
Reflections
Reflections
As I continue trying to look into this question of whether ask-yourself questions help students interact differently with story problems, I will use more informal methods. I would like to observe if using ask-yourself questions has an impact on how much students ask for help. I want to see if any of them develop new habits. I would like to count how many students choose to use the questions voluntarily instead of me telling them they have to.
It had been my initial intention when I wrote my research plan to try the ask-yourself questions twice with students and see if their opinions changed at all with a week in between. Due to homework assignments and schedules, there was only the opportunity to do that with one student, which did not feel like enough data to use. This aspect of my original action plan will be the next thing I implement for this research.
One concern I had even before starting the research was that the students would say "yes" to the interview questions because of not wanting to let me down. There are some who I suspect were not completely honest, or completely accurate in their responses. Those I tried to denote in the field notes sections on the Interviews tab. I said being truthful was very important, but that doesn't necessarily mean the students were accurate. This is one of the reasons I want to be more informal about data gathering going forward: it is my hypothesis that I will get more robust data if I am observing reactions as opposed to interviewing students. Questions will be informal as well, such as, "Did that work for you?"
I had been hoping that students would come to me with story problems as a part of their homework and that I would be able to apply the questions to actual work that was due. This did not happen. I tried to choose story problems that were appropriate for each student's abilities. I believe this negatively impacted the research. For Student 1 I picked problems that were too easy and that student decided the questions weren't necessary. For Student 3 I picked problems that were too hard and they decided that since the questions didn't help them solve the problems, they were too difficult. As I continue with this action research, I will be applying it to school work as opposed to coming up with problems on the spot. I think this strategy will also help get more accurate and meaningful data going forward.
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