The Principal's Dilemma

Reflection:

The principal's dilemma tasks aligns with the Standard of Mathematical Practice 6: attend to precision. Throughout the task students must provide a range of circumstances on why their solution would be the correct club for the principal to cancel. Students must use mathematics to represent the club with the least amount of growth to support their claim to the principal. While working through this task there must be a strong case present which allows learners to find multiple mathematical statements to further support their claim.

The task was difficult as there is no explicit starting point. Students must use their prior mathematical knowledge to begin this and create a strong argument for the club that should be cancelled. I used very simple operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division to complete this task. The challenge to this task is using the correct terminology and attending to the context of the task to correctly defend a claim against which club should be cancelled.

The task does have a lower floor because to begin, student could strictly look at the difference of members each year. It progresses once it is noted that you cannot state the growth or decline of each club unless you begin looking at rates of growth and decrease based on previous members. I would like to modify this task to ask students to explain their mathematics further as when I looked back on my completed task I was confused on where I had gotten some of my values. Asking students to further explain the mathematics or methods they used to solve this problem would aid in students creating reasonable claims.

Source: https://www.doe.virginia.gov/testing/sol/standards_docs/mathematics/2016/rich/index.shtml#plan