Running Head: ERROR ANALYSIS AND LEARNING TRAJECTORY 1

Reflection of Students Mathematical Process

Dany Mao Dara

Prof. C. Wong
TCSJ
MIAA 330






















Running Head: ERROR ANALYSIS AND LEARNING TRAJECTORY 2

Reflection of Students Mathematical Process

For the past week my students have been diving in and exploring with rational numbers.
They had been challenged to add, subtract, multiply, and divide rational numbers. Over a week of
lessons on rational numbers and the numerous practices both homework and classwork, I feel
that my students are ready to solve numerical problems involving rational numbers in real life
situation. I challenged my students to work on a task called Cat Food which was taken from
Insidemathematics website. Even though this was my high group of students and they can easily
grasp on to new concept, misconceptions did occur. Here is the link to the actual task and
learning trajectory.
http://www.insidemathematics.org/assets/common-core-math-tasks/cat%20food.pdf
The task required students to use multiplication with fractions to solve multi step real
world problems as well as estimation skills. They also need to reason quantitatively and label
units. This task asked students to figure out the amount of cat food needed to feed two cats for 29
days, 30 days, 31 days, and 60 days.
One misconception several of my students encountered was, making sense of quantities
and their relationship. For example, according to the given problem cat food are sold in packs and
in each pack there are 3 cans of cat food. However, when my students arrived at the answer of
12.16 cans needed to feed two cats, they miserably failed to recognize that they needed to round
their number to the nearest whole number. The lack of not being able to relate to real life and
understand the idea of buying a whole 3-pack and finds the cost of quantities have led some of my
students to this misconception.
Estimation is a critical component of number sense and after this activity I felt that my
students needed to re- visit the concept of making estimation and evaluate estimation. To build on
this skill I would incorporate math games and activities in my lessons and provide students
opportunities to practice real life situation in the classroom. I would also demonstrate estimation
Running Head: ERROR ANALYSIS AND LEARNING TRAJECTORY 3

by rounding or changing numbers to another numbers that are easier to work with. For example,
1240 plus 4899 would be estimated as 1000 plus 5000. I would also bring store ads to class and
have students estimate the actual price of the item after the discount. For example, to figure out 25
percent of $39.97, they would round the original price to $40, this would make it easier to see a
saving of $10 on the purchase.