PROBLEM SOLVING
The focus of this project is problem solving in math using word problems and performance
assessment tasks for middle school students. Students in my 7th grade class had
a difficult time with the open-ended math and science portions of the Stanford Achievement Test 9 (SAT 9) Standardized Test. The SAT9 Test is one of the instruments
being used to measure how successful students are in the areas of math, science,
reading and language arts. Problem solving will assist in developing math, reading
and language arts skills. The student is asked to not only solve the problem but also give
a reasonable explanation as to how he arrived at the answer.
The following sites offer many problem solving activities.
Probability
This location offers a wide variety of ideas to be used at different grade levels
on the topic of Probability.
Puzzles
Under Yahooligan, Yahoo For Kids, is a math puzzle page called Eric's Page of Puzzles
. Here you will find math word puzzles for your students and links to the answers.
Fundrum My Conundrum is a site that offers math puzzles at three levels: easy, medium and hard. Here you have
the option of solving the problems yourself or writing to the author for the solution
at the address given at the end of the problem page.
The Ultimate Puzzle Site has links to four categories of puzzles to challange students.
A Wonderful Resource
This location offers a wide variety of math topics from Dr. Math
and has a great section on word problems. Although my focus area is middle school,
this site has other grades levels also.
Performance Assessment
This site supplies open-ended problems on a 4th grade level that can be adapted to
other grades.
Integrating the Internet
The following sites require that students have access to the internet.
The Internet Pizza Server
Stock Market Lesson
A Web Interactive Stock Market Learning Project for K-12