Month: May 2017

Misconceptions about Multiple Methods

/ Bill McCallum / 12 Comments

You may have noticed that I am back to publishing regular blog posts! My goal for now is a blog post every second Wednesday. I am now also trying to answer forum questions promptly. I want to thank the readers who took up the slack for the last year and a half in answering questions in the forums. In particular, I’d like to call out abieniek, Alexei Kassymov, and Lane Walker, whose answers were always spot on.

Now to the topic of this post. There has been a lot of talk since the standards came out about what they say about multiple methods for arithmetic operations, and I’d like to clear up a couple of points.

First, the standards do encourage that students have access to multiple methods as they learn to add, subtract, multiply and divide. But this does not mean that you have to solve every problem in multiple ways. Having different methods available is like having different means of transportation available to get to work; flexibility is good, but it doesn’t mean you have to go to school by car, then by bus, then walk, then bike—every single day! The point of having multiple methods available is to encourage students to think strategically about what might be the best method for a given problem, not force them to solve every problem four times.

Second, the different methods are not unrelated; they form a progression, with the ultimate goal being the standard algorithm. For example, when students are first learning to multiply two digit numbers, they might use a rectangle to represent a product such as $42 \times 71$.

This shows the fundamental role of the distributive property in multiplying multi-digit numbers. You have to multiply each base ten component into each other one. Indeed, the same rectangle representation provides a visual proof of the distributive property itself.

At some later point students might just start writing down all the partial products, without using the rectangle to derive them.

Note the correspondence between the rectangle method and the partial product method, indicated by the colors. The first row of the rectangle and shows all the products by the 2 in 42 (in red); the second row shows all the products by the 40 (in blue). The products in the partial product method are grouped in the same way. There are many ways you can order the partial products, but if you group them as I have here, going from right to left in each two-digit number, as in the standard algorithm, you make an amazing discovery: you can add up all the partial products in each group (blue group or red group) in your head as you go along. That’s because, in each case, adding the 2 to the 140 or the 40 to the 2800, there are enough zeroes in the second addend to accommodate the first, so it is easy to write down the sum right away, without writing the addends separately.

OK, so it’s not always quite this easy, because every now and then you will have to keep in mind a bundled unit from the previous step (aka carrying), but you will never have to remember that for more than one step at a time, because each bundled unit gets used up at the next step. So if you invent a notation for remembering the bundled unit (what we used to call “little 1 in the corner” when I was growing up) then you can still avoid writing down all the partial products, and just compute the sum within each group as you go along. You have just created the standard algorithm.

The different methods are not isolated different ways of doing the same thing; they are steps towards fluency with the standard algorithm, fluency that is not fragile because it is supported by understanding.

Curricular Coherence no. 4: Coherence of Practice

/ Al Cuoco / Leave a comment

In this final post about curricular coherence, I’m pinch-hitting for Bill, who is busy reorganizing his wine cellar.  This time, we talk about coherence of mathematical practice.

We value coherence of content because we believe that a coherently arranged curriculum makes it possible for a student to see the subject as a whole, to understand the logical connections and deep structures, and to use that understanding for more efficient problem-solving and better retention of knowledge and procedures. But making it possible does not make it probable. The way students do mathematics, their mathematical practice, may have an effect on their ability to take advantage of a coherent curriculum. The CCSSM describes eight aspects of the complex construct of mathematical practice. Here we focus on two aspects, using structure (MP7) and abstraction (MP8).

Structure in arithmetic and algebraic expressions reveals what might be called “hidden meaning.” For example, writing $x^2-6x-7$ as $(x-3)^2-16$ reveals that, for real values of $x$, the expression assumes values greater than or equal to $-16$ (and it assumes that value only when $x=3$). Writing it as $(x-7)(x+1)$ highlights the values of $x$ that make the expression 0.

Treating pieces of expressions as a single “chunk” can simplify calculations; seeing that $4x^2-8x+3$ can be written as $(2x)^2-4(2x)+3$ helps one obtain the factorization from the (easier) factorization of $z^2-4z+3.$ This example can be generalized to encompass all polynomial expressions, providing students with a general purpose tool that can be used to transform a general polynomial into one with leading coefficient~1. It amounts to a change of variable in order to hide complexity, a practice that is useful all over mathematics.

Hidden meaning in geometric figures often involves the creation of auxiliary lines not originally part of a given figure. Two classic examples are the construction of a line through a vertex of a triangle parallel to the opposite side as a way to see that the angle measures of a triangle add to $180^\circ$ and the introduction of a symmetry line in an isosceles triangle to see that the base angles are congruent. Another kind of hidden structure makes use of the invariance of area when it is calculated in more than one way—finding the length of the altitude to the hypotenuse of a right triangle, given the lengths of its legs, for example.

A final example of using structure is in the view that students form of the base ten notational system. The compactness and regularity of this system make it useful for efficient computation and estimation. But in that compactness there is also the danger of superficial, and therefore fragile, grasp of procedures. The Number and Operations in Base Ten domain in CCSSM lays out a progression designed to help students learn to see the decimal expansion of a rational number as, in advanced language, a linear combination of powers of 10 with coefficients taken from integers between 0 and 9 helps. Similarly, viewing a polynomial in $x$ as a linear combination of powers of $x$ can lead to an understanding of polynomial algebra as a system in its own right. Writing $3x^2-7x + 5$ “in base $(x-2)$” as
$$
3(x-2)^2+5(x-2) + 3
$$
reveals another kind of hidden meaning in the expression.

Another theme that runs throughout a coherent curriculum is a cross-grade emphasis that helps students develop and use the many faces of abstraction. One of the most important uses of abstraction is captured in the CCSSM Standard for Mathematical Practice no.~8 (MP8), “Look for and express regularity in repeated reasoning.” It asks students to abstract a process from several instances of that process in a way that doesn’t refer to the inputs to any particular instance. Describing that process in precise algebraic language allows one to create general algorithms, equations, expressions, and functions. This practice can bring coherence to many seemingly different areas of the curriculum that often cause students difficulty.

The description of MP8 in CCSSM gives the following example:

By paying attention to the calculation of slope as they repeatedly check whether points are on the line through $(1, 2)$ with slope 3, middle school students might abstract the equation $\frac{y – 2}{x – 1} = 3$.

Helping students develop the habit of testing several numerical points to see if they are on the line and then looking for and expressing the “rhythm” in their calculations gives them a way to find the equation of a line between two points without leaning on formulas (“point slope form,” for example), and, more importantly, it gives them a general purpose tool for finding Cartesian equations of geometric objects, given some defining geometric conditions.

As another example, consider the task of building an equation. Teachers know that building is much harder for students than checking. The same practice of abstracting from numerical examples is useful here, too. For example, consider the stylized story problem:

Emilio drives from Tucson to Phoenix at an an average speed of 60MPH and returns at an average speed of 50MPH. If the total time on the road is 4.4 hours, how far is Tucson from Phoenix?

The practice of abstracting regularity from repeated actions can be used to build an equation whose solution is the answer to the problem: One takes several guesses (for the distance) and checks them, focusing on the steps that are common to each of the checks. The goal isn’t to stumble on (or approximate) an answer by “guess and check;” the goal is to come up with a general “guess checker” expressed as an algebraic equation:
$$
\frac {\text{guess}}{60} + \frac {\text{guess}}{50}= 4.4
$$

These two examples seem quite different, but coherence comes from the fact that exactly the same mathematical practice is used to find an algebraic equation whose solution solves the problem.