Sample Analysis of Student Work

John's analysis of the student solutions:

  1. For James and Jessica's equation to be set up properly, both the large and the smaller rectangle would have to be squares.

  2. Dre put a lot of good thinking into her problem and made real good progress. In fact, this is how I first figured this problem out. However, I knew that this thinking was making an improper assumption of the large rectangle sides. Even the picture shows that four widths of a length are being compared to three length of a same distance. The only proper way to solve this problem is to first calculate the widths and lengths of the smaller rectangles.

  3. Matteo doesn't understand the basic of substituting a problem into a formula. The 2L + 2W = 756.

  4. Lisa was on the right track by properly calculating the area of the smaller triangles. However, at this point in solving this problem, she needed to stand back and rethink her problem. Sometimes students aren't used to problems having multi-steps.

  5. Chung has a lot of fancy algebra expression but they are incorrectly applied. He needs to slow down a bit and make sure that his algebraic equations accurately state the problem. He failed to see that there are several steps in solving this problem.