All field experience assignments must include what grade level class you are in! (I will not grade any assignments that don't include your name and the grade level of your field experience class.

1. Word problem interviews:

A. Interview plan assignment

Read the interview results from last year's preservice teachers at the grade level of the class you are in, and learn what you can from those interviews. Write a summary (at least 1/2 page) of what you learned about student knowledge at that grade level. In particular, look for information about what kinds of problems children at this grade level are likely to be able to do, and which problems children at this grade level are likely to have trouble with.

Notice that last year, while all interview questions were given in word problem format, that there was some inconsistency (even within interviews) in interview questions. While some interviews were focused mainly on childrens abilities to solve problems of different CGI types, other interviews also significantly changed the difficulty level of the numbers in the problems. This meant that in several interviews, the children were unable to solve the last, hardest problems, but because the problems were harder in two ways, the interviewer couldn't tell for sure if the children had trouble because the word problem type was more confusing or if the problem was the size of the numbers.

Plan an interview that you will conduct with the children in the class you are in for your field experience.

• Your interview should have several word problems that you will ask students to solve, and show you how they solved them.
• You should interview at least 3 children, and the interviews should be conducted one-on-one if at all possible.
• Your interview questions should be guided by the interviews you read about, and they should be aimed at finding out what children in your class can do. Usually this means you will want to ask questions that are near the level where you expect children to start having trouble (include a few easier questions to start with, and work up to more difficult questions). Pay attention to changing just one thing at a time (problem type or numbers) so you can tell what made a more difficult problem more difficult.
• The main focus for this interview should be understanding difficulties introduced by changing word problems to a more difficult word problem type, rather than identifying number fact fluency. The default for grades K and 1 interviews should be to provide counters (like the Unifix cubes in your kit) for children to use if they wish to. You should explain in your interview plan if you are planning to provide manipulatives, and why you made that choice.

B. Conduct the interview:

When I have OK-ed your plan, you should interview at least 3 children, ideally one-on-one.

Write a report on your interview, and post it to the discussion board. Your report should include the details of what questions were easiest and hardest for the children you interviewed, and what sorts of thinking strategies children shared with you for how they solved the problems. You should use pseudonyms for all of the children to preserve anonymity. Your report should be at least 500 words.  Don't forget to include the grade level of your class in your report too!