Allowance Problem

Reflection

The allowance task aligns with Standard of Mathematical Practice 2: reason abstractly and quantitatively because students must contextualize and decontextualize throughout the problem in order to solve. Students must contextualize the price of the different coins involved and decontextualize the coins to find the total allowance amount. Students must organize the information and accurately represent it to provide a concise solution with the proper amount of money and coins.

The task was a little challenging on the basis that the system of equations I initially created had three variable and most students struggle with a singular variable in an equation. Students may struggle to persevere through solving the problem once they have creating the system because of the multitude of variables. I would encourage students to start by find the amount of one coin and then using that information to help find the amount of other coins.

I would modify this activity by having the students have coins in front of them to solve and then decontextualizing the coins by creating an equation or visual to represent the information. Having coins in front of the students would create a concrete model that they could create a more abstract model from. The coins would also make the problem more accessible for all students as they could create more guess and check models to draw patterns from rather than abstractly creating equations to represent the information in order to solve.

Source: https://www.nc2ml.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/7th-grade-PS-solutions.pdf