Justification
We did many games and activities on numbers sense as a fun way to start the year and solidify my high school students’ understanding of numbers, which is imperative to being successful in math. We focused on doing operations with numbers with negatives signs as this can be a common issue. Many students understood how to do operations with numbers but consistently messed up the negative signs. This issue persisted as they learned to solve equations and inequalities. Many of them got the process, but would mess up the signs when doing operations on numbers. When I went through tests, I consistently saw issues on the majority of the tests with negative signs. When I helped students throughout class, I consistently had to correct them on which sign they get when doing operations with numbers.
I focused on helping the entire class, as most students have this problem. While there were a few students who didn’t have these issues, I would say the majority had issues with negative signs. I tried framing problems with signs in terms of money, because that tends to make the situation more applicable. This did help the students a little bit, but they still struggled when the application was removed and they were just working on the problems. The activities on number sense helped, but without this daily focus the same struggles came back. The data and my observations showed that I need to find something to help them with this issue. My past attempts didn't worked and this issue would only continue to affect them.
This topic is important for the students' futures in math classes and in life. Operations with negative numbers comes up in about every topic in mathematics. While this can lead to minor mistakes in some topics, in other topics it can inhibit students from understanding concepts. For example factoring relies heavily on students understanding operations with negative numbers. Without this understanding, they will constantly mess up their factors. Beyond math classes, students need to understand how to work with negative numbers for their real life. Operations with numbers comes up every day and in many career paths as well. Negative numbers will come up as they plan a budget for their daily life. This concept is unavoidable both in school and in life.
Data
On test one, operations with negative numbers was a large portion of the test, 64% of students made at least one mistake with negative signs. On test two, on solving equations, 23% of students made at least one mistake with negative signs. This improved on the second test, but on the third test, where we were solving inequalities, 68% of students made at least one mistake with negative signs. As the quantitative data showed, the students were still struggling with negative signs.
My instances of qualitative data were daily. For example, as we were finding intercepts, my students made mistakes often with their negative signs. They had trouble understanding that subtracting a negative is adding. They also struggled when they had a situation like 3-7. They didn't understand that the answer should be negative, because you are subtracting more than you have.