In my science teaching seminar, we just read a paper on differentiated instruction, and I assigned for homework a writing assignment to discuss how differentiated instruction connects to what we have been learning about formative assessment (something we have been learning about all semester).
For class I was hoping to give to the learning assistants (LAs) a few different teaching scenarios. One scenario was going to involve some fake data from a "quiz" where math students had to do two different but related problems. In the scenario, 1/3 of your students bomb one question on the quiz, 1/3 of your students bomb the other question, and 1/3 of your students ace both of them.
I was going to have to the LAs look over the quizzes to decide what skills which students were struggling with, and have the come up with a plan for their class the following day that would further all students along in their understanding (hence differentiating the instruction based on formative assessment).
For one of the quiz problems, I was going to use this problem, taken from Dan Meyer's sample geometry tests. That is until I started to try to solve the problem my self. Can you figure out what's wrong with this problem?
