Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Now We're Cookin'

We were going over our quizzes yesterday and I had a student make an interesting observation about the rubric we use to determine the overall score on a concept/skill.

5: Strong concept; No errors
4: Strong concept; Errors present
3: Flawed concept; No errors
2: Flawed concept; Errors present
1: Little or no attempt

She says, "This reminds me of the first time my brother and I made waffles without my dad helping us."

Oh yeah, what happened?

"We used baking soda instead of baking powder and they turned out really bad."

How's that like our quiz?

"We can know what we are doing but make a simple error and it messes the whole problem up."

So what would you rather do: know how to cook the waffles and use the wrong ingredients or use the right ingredients but not know how to cook?

"I'd rather make the mistake with the ingredients."

Why?

"Because all I have to do is use the right stuff and the waffles would've been good."

Is that easier to correct than if you had all the right stuff but you didn't know how to cook?

"Yeah. A lot easier."

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Neat connection that she made. Making waffles and quiz rubrics, these are the kinds of things most people would assume have nothing to do with one another.

MariaD said...

Trackback - your applets used as an example http://groups.google.com/group/mathfuture/browse_thread/thread/d39f6eb43f356964

See if this post's comments work (the older one says "unavailable"

bryan battaglia said...

I like that! Good stuff here! Keep it up.