Category: Similarity, Right Triangles and Trigonometry

Comparing Parts of Sides Instead of Whole Sides

Post author By mpershan
Post date June 20, 2016
7 Comments on Comparing Parts of Sides Instead of Whole Sides

What is the thinking that led this student to make this mistake?

I’ve been teaching geometry for six years, and I figure I must have seen this mistake dozens of times. It’s so common that I have a name for it in my class — it’s a part-whole issue. Students know that AD is to DB as AE is to EC, and I think DE gets (correctly) associated with AD and AE while BC gets (correctly) associated with DB and EC. The issue, though, is that AD, DE, AE are all whole sides whereas as DB and EC are parts of sides. So while this student is correct to associate these sides, the student is comparing whole side lengths to parts rather than finding the proportion between different whole side lengths.

I’d be pretty surprised if other geometry teachers haven’t seen this mistake too, and I’d be interested to hear their explanations of why this mistake is so common.

When I shared this on twitter, the main conversation was about the quality of the problem, and especially the fact that this diagram is not to scale.

https://twitter.com/vickersty/status/744900055971278848

The side representing 2 is > twice as big as the side that's s 6 — and we wonder why they think math lies?

— Cognitively_Accessible_Math (@geonz) June 20, 2016

I was surprised by this response for two reasons:

While I wouldn’t want my students to start studying this math with this task (they didn’t) I think the wildly out-of-scale diagram is a nice way to draw students’ attention to the underlying relationships between the sides. I often encourage students to make quick sketches to help guide their thinking, and these sketches don’t have to be to scale in order to be helpful.
Most importantly: The student whose work we’re studying did not have an issue with the diagram! He had successfully solved the first four problems, and then he offered a reasonable (but incorrect) answer to the last one. The underlying issue this student had is easily explained without the diagram, and it’s one that I’ve seen often with accurate diagrams.

Then again, there were so many people on twitter suggesting that this problem has major issues, it’s making me pause and wonder if they have a point. I’ll have to think more about it.

In any event, I then started thinking about addressing and furthering the thinking that this student had. This wasn’t just an isolated mistake — a lot of students in class had similar issues. I wanted to start class with an activity that would help further their thinking on this type of problem. What activity could I do?

Because I wanted to help students see the subtle difference between part/whole and whole/whole comparisons, I decided to use a Matching Connecting Representations activity (see more of these here).

I came up with two different versions. Any ideas on how to improve them? Would they spur kids to think about different strategies?

I really like the lack of scale in the drawings. It’s important to teach that diagrams can be misleading. The math isn’t lying, just their unconscious interpolating brains. When talking abouth math, or any other problem solving situation, which part of the brain is responsible for problem solving?

Max wants to tackle the ambiguity with the diagram head-on, and offers a “Which One Doesn’t Belong” activity for doing so.

Children and Teachers on Feedback

Post author By mpershan
Post date June 10, 2015
8 Comments on Children and Teachers on Feedback

How do you predict that a group of students (9th Graders, Geometry, nearly all are comfortable with scaling) would respond to this prompt? Do you think they’ll disagree? Converge on one option? What reasons do you think they will bring to support their answers? Do you think that their responses will differ significantly from the responses that a group of teachers would give? If so, how?

Sheesh, that’s a lot of prompts. Let’s condense that:

What do you predict students will respond?
How do you predict that a group of teachers will respond?
How would you respond?

Geometric Measurement and Dimension Pythagorean Theorem Right Triangles Similarity, Right Triangles and Trigonometry

All Ramps Are 45 Degrees + Pythagorean Theorem

Post author By mpershan
Post date April 23, 2015
7 Comments on All Ramps Are 45 Degrees + Pythagorean Theorem

Two interesting mistakes here. The first has to do with the Pythagorean Theorem, the other (more interesting) has to do with the angle of inclination.

I wonder what she’s looking at that the angle always stays the same. My guess, based on her first triangle, is that she thinks that the diagonal of a rectangle always bisects the right angle.

This might make for a nice bit of feedback for her. I could ask, “Is it possible to draw a rectangle whose diagonals don’t always make 45 degree angles? The answer matters for what you wrote here.” Or maybe the feedback I supply here should be a counterexample — a very long rectangle whose diagonals clearly don’t make 45 degrees? What’s my goal in this feedback, anyway?

I suppose my only goal is to have her know that the diagonals don’t bisect the angles, and to believe this in a way that she’ll remember and be able to reproduce on a new problem. So I want to equip her with the means to prove it to herself.

Given all this, I think I should probably be more direct in my feedback about the fact of non-bisection. I should leave the proof up to her, though. “Try to draw a rectangle whose diagonals don’t make 45 degree angles.”

One last worry. What if I’m wrong about my diagnosis of her thinking? What if she is seeing 45 degrees in these ramps in some other way? Maybe the best thing is to check in with her verbally before giving her any written feedback, to confirm that my theory is correct?

Update (4/23/15): Here’s the feedback and her post-feedback work. In conversation, I was able to confirm that my “every rectangle’s diagonals bisect a right angle” theory was right.

Decimals Geometry Similar Figures Similarity, Right Triangles and Trigonometry

Decimal Misconceptions? Meet similar triangles.

Post author By mpershan
Post date June 10, 2014
4 Comments on Decimal Misconceptions? Meet similar triangles.

A note from the submitter:

Along the lines of one I sent you awhile back. This is one of my best students, and several other students gave answers with similar misconceptions. I pretty much ignored it last time it came up, thinking that it was an anomaly, but I think it’s a significant hole in my students’ understanding. Students were using calculators today.

What’s going on here in the student work? What’s the connection to the earlier post?

Decimal Misconceptions? Meet Trigonometry.

Post author By mpershan
Post date June 10, 2014

A reflection from the submitter:

I think this 10th grader is saying .174>.34>.5. I wonder what she would have concluded if she’d followed the directions and rounded to 3 decimal places? Many kids were tripped up by the .5, maybe she’d say they were increasing except the .5?

Do you agree with the submitter’s assessment? How do you help a student learning trigonometry nail this down?

I think it’s important to say something more subtle than “this kid doesn’t understand decimals.” One thing that this site has documented is that kids can understand something at 1:00 and then do something entirely different at 1:01. It’s best to see this not as a failure of decimal knowledge, but maybe a failure to use decimal knowledge in this situation. (Some people would say this kid’s knowledge of decimals in a certain context failed to transfer to this problem.) The difference is in how we respond. This kid probably doesn’t need the “basics” of decimals. We just need to make a connection to somewhere where she knows about decimals, I’m speculating.