The Problem Solving and Communication Activity Series

The introductory document contains a series of activities designed to get students thinking about what good problem solvers do, and how to communicate their thinking by writing (or talking) mathematically.

What does it mean to fully understand a problem, and how does it help students find solution paths and build confidence? Included in these documents are several activities that support students to develop strategies for understanding challenging math problems, along with facilitation suggestions for teachers.

We will continue to explore how to understand what the problem is asking by providing a second week's worth of activities for each of the four new PoWs.

Guess and check is an important (and popular) problem-solving strategy, though it often gets a bad rap and may not be developed into the strong and powerful resource it could be. The guess and check strategy has at least three purposes: (1) to understand a problem thoroughly, (2) to home in on a solution, and (3) to discover efficient ways to jump to a solution by noticing patterns and developing related algebraic representations.

Solve a Simpler Problem is a technique that can be used in several ways to solve challenging problems. In some situations you can see how to work the problem with easier numbers. This may show you an approach that you can try with the more difficult numbers. Second, you can choose to break the original problem into smaller steps, finding answers for parts of the problem, and then putting those together for the whole solution. Finally, students may see a way to change this hard problem into one that they have solved before.

The Tables and Patterns strategy is a way to organize your problem solving that makes it easier to explore patterns in the calculations and results. It is often used after some initial work on the problem using Understanding the Problem or Guess and Check strategies. Tables can be used to efficiently home in on answers, or you can use tables to organize the logic of your calculations and make explicit the relationships between quantities in the problem. As you may have seen in the Simpler Problem strategy, tables can help put different iterations in order and compare them. Tables can take the form of simple t-tables to very complex spreadsheets. Spreadsheets and other related software are especially efficient because they can be used to rearrange your work for different comparisons without having to write it all over again.

What does it mean to fully understand a problem, and how does it help students find solution paths and build confidence? This time around we have expanded activities to elicit relevant knowledge, recognize implications, and make drawings that focus on the key mathematical information.

In our previous round of Guess and Check, we focused on using guess and check to understand the problem and to home in on a solution. In this round we delve deeper into the uses of guess and check. We present three different activities that focus on students at different levels of development as problem solvers or different levels of understanding of this round's PoW. You might use different activities with different groups of students to differentiate problem-solving instruction.