Diagnostic Interviews

Educators are always trying to find ways to improve their instructional practices. A great way for educators to make instructional decisions is through assessments. One form of assessment that is used to determine what students known regarding a certain concept are diagnostic interviews. Diagnostic interviews are especially helpful for new students as well as lower achieving students to pin point students strengths and weaknesses. Diagnostic interviews can be used across all content areas and provide educators with an ample amount of important information. What happens in a diagnostic interview is that students are given a set of questions usually given by the teacher. The students are to answer the questions as well as demonstrate their thinking

My first question was, “ can you solve the problem 2/3 x 6?” I allowed each student as much time as they needed as well as gave them a piece of paper and pencil. I told them that they could solve the problem any way they would like. Once they had the answer I would ask for the students to tell me how they did the problem. Depending on how the answered I asked two sub questions. These questions included, “Can you draw a picture to demonstrate this problem?” “Can you create a story problem with this equation?” “Can you do this problem Oscar’s way?” Oscars way is the standard algorithm. I knew the student would answer the first question using one of these three ways and depending on which on they used right away, I would ask the other two questions that they didn’t use to solve the problem. The second question I asked was a story problem. The question was, “There are 8 penguins at the zoo. ¼ of the penguins are males. How many penguins at the zoo are

Student A was able to come up with a story problem as well as solve a story problem. This showed that Student A had a strong understanding of multiplication of fractions by a whole number. Both Student B and C weren’t successful at coming up with a story problem, but were able to solve a story problem with multiplication of a fraction by a whole number. Based on my data I concluded that students did have a good understanding on how to multiply a fraction by a whole number in a couple of ways. I learned that each student benefited from doing contextual problems because all three students were able to answer the story problem quickly and accurately. Based in this I decided that students were ready to move on to dividing a whole number by a fraction and a fraction by a whole number. I have created a problem solving introductory lesson on