Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Maths: showing working out?

Well, this is something that teachers in our school drum into the students from 1st grade. A substantial portion of our standardized state testing as well as district testing require constructed responses. I am not sure whether it is even possible to score more than just proficient on the state exam without crafting constructed responses. As a result, the classwork and tests always include long and brief constructed responses and for good measure, the students are told to show work on multiple choice answers as well. At times, it is rather a bit of an overkill. If the student doesn't care about doing well on the state/district testing or getting good grades, then there is little incentive to comply. My children generally went along as required by their teachers although there have been a few occasions when I had to issue a challenge borrowed from one of their highly regarded GT teachers who believes that if you can't explain to someone else how you arrived at your answer, then you have not acquired a deep enough understanding of the concept. Fortunately, this same teacher also believes in many ways to arrive at the same answer.

I'm curious whether I am the only one whose child is being allowed not to show work. I really do mean that. She can hand in papers with nothing but the answer, even in cases where one pretty inevitably does "work", such as those involving multidigit x multidigit multiplication (DD often will scratch these out on some random scrap of paper that is handy and not pollute her HW with it). Not only that, the teacher will sometimes instruct them to cross out portions of the HW that enforce tedious work-showing.

I also recently found out that kids in this class can take pretests and test out of any math unit (they get computer work instead). DD just hadn't bothered to tell me this. I don't always hear much from her!

DS11's homework is almost all in the online Borg Math environment. He can just click the right answer without showing any work. Apparently this is OK with the teacher.

I want him to have the skill of showing work, but it's not worth the struggle for me to insist on doing things my way when the teacher doesn't care about it.

Sigh.

Yes-- DD's math classes have pretty much never required it. WE have-- once she got into algebra, I mean.

She could STILL hand in twelve step trig problems with nothing but an answer, however, given that the computer only cares about the result.

Sometimes, she does. She claims "I did it all on my calculator anyway-- I didn't have anything to write down." Which is usually bogus, btw, but often not worth arguing over if she's doing the problems right (mostly she is).

This is what helped my son as well. But it takes till they are in at least doing more complex math.

I think if you are showing your work you should be able to show how YOU did it.

Therefore 50 is half of 100 therefore 15 % of 50 is 15/2 = 7.5. If they really want an algorithm then they should use something like 17% of 63.

My DD HAS occasionally been dinged by this policy. She fortunately had neat handwriting (I think it's sloppy handwriting kids who could get the worst results here) but sometimes writes very small, and a 5 becomes a 6, etc. Bing. Wrong answer due to copying error.

Interesting. I don't think this is required here. I was just going to point out that standardized tests don't care if you show work, but I guess I am incorrect.

[quote=ultramarina]I'm curious whether I am the only one whose child is being allowed not to show work. I really do mean that. She can hand in papers with nothing but the answer, even in cases where one pretty inevitably does "work", such as those involving multidigit x multidigit multiplication (DD often will scratch these out on some random scrap of paper that is handy and not pollute her HW with it). Not only that, the teacher will sometimes instruct them to cross out portions of the HW that enforce tedious work-showing.

Our school sounds very much like Quantum2003's. They require constructed responses, on every day assignments and on state assessments. But our kids have learned this way since beginning school, and don't find it problematic at this point. I don't feel they are required to show tedious busy-work, but do have to explain their logic. They also do a fair amount of writing about math. DS just finished an 18-page "portfolio" on the latest unit, where he had to do everything from discussing how various formulae were derived, to creating and then grading some parent problems we had to complete, to talking about which part of the unit he found most interesting and why. It is part of their differentiation; I assume many kids didn't have as much to say, but DS got quite involved. He really thought a lot about how the formulae related to each other. It is interesting to watch his "technical writing" evolve, by the way. in the past I considered him more of a creative writer, but this was very well-written.

This is indeed very unusual. Your DD has a unusual teacher and has not been corrupted by the commmon core standard. Explaining your work has been taken to a whole new level with common core. It literally means using English to explain your reasoning for every little thing from Kindergarten math and up. All in the mistaken view of this somehow teaches deeper understanding.

At the same time, showing the relevant steps in math calculation and particularly in word problems are good and often necessary when the problems get hard. I have no issues with that and will encourage my child to do that.