Sasha Howard

October 14, 2016

Clinical interview paper

I began my clinical interview with student A. Because we are out in the portables, we had

to walk to the main building to sit down in front of the office to do the interview. Unfortunately,

parts of my recording are spotty because of hallway noise, but for the most part the location

worked well. I chose student A because ever since the beginning of the school year, he seemed to

have expressed great interest in math and I thought he would be most communicable with me.

We sat down and I told him what the purpose of this interview was; he smiled and told me he

was ready. I set the manipulatives (fraction cubes and chips) on the table as an option for him to

use and began, “Amy eats 2

7¿¿pizza…”

The entire time student A consistently knew the easiest way of getting the question

answered through standard algorithms. He knew the several ways when to use multiplication,

subtraction, and addition, and it almost threw me off guard how well he was doing. I even threw

a harder fraction-addition problem to test him and I asked him to explain how he did it, “Well I

know that you add these two fractions together to get 65 , then you add the 3 and the 1 because

they’re wholes, then add the one whole you get from the whole fifth, and there’s 15 left over so

the answer is 5 15 . Then I found his kryptonite – “How else could you do the problem?” When I

asked him this question, he looked utterly stunned, as if saying what do you mean, there’s

another way? Of course, he knew other ways but he couldn’t get past the methods he was taught

the previous school year in the 3/4th split he was in. The student fulfilled the CCSS’s I chose,

“Solve word problems involving addition and subtraction of fractions referring to the same

whole and having like denominators, e.g., by using visual fraction models and equations to

represent the problem”, but failed to look at multiple ways to do a single task, which I was

surprised in. the only ways he could come up with were “10x7 also equals

10+10+10+10+10+10+10”, which isn’t wrong but not every way you could do it. He strayed

away from the manipulatives and didn’t draw for any of the problems until I prodded him to. I

expressed my findings with my mentor teacher and she told me to do it again with another

student, so I did so with student B.

Student B differs to student A in many ways; student B is lower in mathematics and he

uses the different methods I was referencing to when I asked student A. I sat student B down and

he immediately started drawing out the problem as I was talking. However, student B struggled

with understanding parts of the CCSS’s I was looking for – he misunderstood representations of

parts of a whole co-existing within the same amount. For example, the pizza problem I

mentioned before, he counted every part of the pizza as 4. So, his answer ended up being 167

instead of it being 67 .

One question I wished I would have asked both students was why they put certain

numbers in certain areas. Such as 15X12… student A got the answer just fine, but student be

forgot to multiple the 1 in the 12 with the rest of the numbers so his answer ended up being half

complete. Student B also relied on his experience with the online program, IReady. He

mentioned several times in the interview, “Well, in IReady, when there’s dollar signs that means

to subtract” or “In IReady, it’s always like that…”. So, I wish I would have asked him more

about his experiences with that program. Lastly, I wanted to see what they would have done with

the manipulates because neither of them used them.

I would say this has been a fantastic experience getting to know these kids personally

when it comes to math. Student A had a fun time doing the “easy” math problems while student

B got to have a chance practicing some third-grade math. The interviewing process was a little

awkward at first, especially when I was trying to make sure that the recorder could hear me and

the student when all the background noise was going on. Parts of the interview, I forgot to ask

the questions, so I had to go back and make sure I got their responses for those and that was a

little hard as well. Overall, I enjoyed the experience seeing how different two children of the

same age can learn and the ways they decided to solve the problems they did.

*pictures: A represents student A and B represents student B. The green is my

handwriting after I was done interviewing them both.

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