"Which Would You Rather?" Open Ended Questions.

It is important to incorporate open ended questions in math that encourage math-based conversations and helps students learn to justify their thinking used to support their thinking.  The best thing about an open ended question is that there is no one answer.  These types of questions encourages higher level thinking to solve problems.  In addition, open ended questions allow students to see that it is possible to use different ways to solve the problems and can produce more than one answer.

By having students open ended questions, they gain confidence in themselves because struggling students can use basic skills to find an answer while more advanced abilities can use different skills to find an answer and both are correct.  If the problems are written well, they easily become engaged. Furthermore, open ended questions encourage students to utilize creativity to solve the chosen problems.

In addition, student responses to the problems can be used by the teacher to assess their level of understanding and ability.  Open ended problems provide informal assessment but the teacher can see the thinking used to solve it, the methods used to solve it, and their understanding of the situation overall.  

The last thing about using open ended math problems is they can be used as warm-up or bell ringer problems, independent, small groups, or even whole class.  When introducing the use of open ended problems, it is important to model the process which can be done as a whole class activity.  Another time, students can work in pairs or small groups to find an answer to the problem and share the answer with the teacher via a video or google classroom.  

I read about the “Which would you rather” activity in one of Matt Miller’s blogs.  I wondered how I could use it in my math class because math is a bit different.  I found a site which provides  “Which would you rather?” Activities to help get started.  There are quite a few already created to start you off.

The selection offered at this site has quite a few ready to use questions for grades K to 12, enough for several months if you do one a week.  Each “Which would you rather” possibility are very open ended. The answer may depend on what you prefer, while others make the person think about the differences based on the situation.

One has students decide which possibility would you rather?  The situation is that you and two friends want pizza for lunch.  If you buy one pie and get a 10% discount, buy two pizzas and get 20 % off, and buy three pizzas to get 30% off.  Would you prefer Option A where each of you buys an individual pizza or option B where one of you buys three pizza on one check and you split the cost with the others.  

It is nice to have a separate worksheet for students to fill out as they work through the question.  The worksheet should have a way for them to say they prefer option ? Rather than option ? because.  There should also be a place for them to show their work and what things did they consider as they began the problem.

There are other types of open ended questions that I’ll cover another time.  This is something I could easily send home for students to work on because there are no correct answers they can find on the internet and they can’t do it via some app like photo math.  Let me know what you think, I’d love to hear.  Have a great day.