Identifying Mistakes.

  I've decided to start the year with error analysis in my two lowest performing classes.  These are the classes with students who do not have a solid foundation in Math.  These are the students who throw out a paper once its been returned.  They do not know how to learn from their mistakes.

I found this lovely sheet of addition and subtraction problems, some correct and some with mistakes.  The sheet requires them to check the math and make corrections as needed.  I took this one step further and requested they identify the mistake made by writing it down.

One of my students asked if I wanted to turn them all into teachers.  I laughed and explained they need to know how to identify the type of error they made so they can get better in math.  Many students actually worked together trying to determine what was done incorrectly.  Most of the mistakes were things like forgetting to add the carried number, forgetting to borrow, adding instead of subtracting.

The reason for this exercise is that I do not plan to record grades until a student has made all the corrections and included the reason for the mistake.  I hope this exercise will help students determine where they still do not fully understand the topic.

Will the idea work?  I don't know yet.  Most of my students have the mindset, even in English, of I've done it once, why work on it more?  In English, they think the first draft should be the final draft and hate rewriting to improve it. In Math, they did the problems so that's it.  Its important to have them learn the material correctly the first time but if not, they need a tool to learn self correction.

I suspect this attitude develops in math because many of the elementary teachers do not stress correcting the work.  I admit, I've not done this except on tests in the past but since reading that students need to know how to explain steps, etc, I am changing my focus to include correcting even daily work.

I'll report back in a few weeks to let you know how it goes.  Let me know what you think.  I would love to hear.