Yesterday, I gave my students an assignment where they had to solve a murder. This is always a fun assignment for students because the suspects are teachers they’ve had over the years. The students are given times and body temperatures for when the body was found and when the police arrived. The students then must use Newton’s law of cooling to find when the murder occurred. They must also analyze alibi information to see who was available at the time of death.
One problem with this assignment is that it is a relic of assignments from years past – one where there’s a right answer and a wrong answer. Several students now immediately turn to sites such as mathway.com, photomath, chegg.com, etc. to solve a problem without even attempting to solve it themselves. The point of this assignment is to assess if the students know how and when to use log functions to solve for a variable that’s in the exponent. Unfortunately, what many students did was plug the known values into the equation, then let the online math problem solvers do the heavy lifting. They couldn’t tell me how they solved the problem because they didn’t actually solve the problem.
While that could be considered cheating, that is now the world we live in. Students and adults use online math calculators to solve problems that are over their head. It’s my job to rework these assignments to actually assess the skills I want them to have, as well as to have the ability to check to see when their answers don’t make sense.
While most students are using online math solvers, at least a few students do have to investigate to figure out the answers initially so they can share their answers with others. I had a student today who got a few such answers from one of those helpful students, but she didn’t get them all.
There’s a value called k that students had to solve for first before they could find the time the person was killed. This student had the right time of death and the correct murderer but her k value was WAY off. I called her up to my desk and asked her where her k value came from. She said she no longer had her work. I asked her to recreate it for me and just show me how she did it. She pulled out her phone and went to mathway.com. I was disappointed but I let it ride because I wanted to see where this was going. She put in a bunch of numbers and got a value different from what she got the first time and it was still wildly wrong. I knew there was no possible way she would guess the k value so I pulled the plug. I told her that I knew that she got the answers from someone else, but that I would like to show her how to do the problem, and that if she would redo her assignment with her new knowledge I would give her full credit. We went through the problem and she had several AH HA! Moments—the times we all live for—and agreed that she would solve the problem correctly now that she understands it.
In my head, while this interaction happened, I wanted to get mad and let her know she did a bad thing. But I had a different voice in my head—the growth mindset voice—asking me what I really wanted. Do I want this student to learn or do I want to punish her? While I don’t support cheating, I took the growth mindset road and the student benefited. There’s no late penalty and she knows she has to do the work to get the grade so now there’s no benefit to cheating. She knows I will give her another chance and she can ask questions and learn. Environments where students are rewarded for trying again and learning versus getting the right answer support the growth mindset and undermine the necessity of cheating. It also fosters a love of learning for the students.
Listening more to my growth mindset voice, I believe, has made me a better teacher for my students.
Dweck, C. S. (2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Random House.
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