Parker Young

Dr. Edwards
MAED 4416
March 16, 2021

Final Clinical Interview Assignment

Preparation

When planning for this assignment, I looked at multiple types of problems to find
one that I both liked and thought would have multiple ways for the student to solve. I
found a problem that I really liked because it was focused on relations and being able to
scale sample ratios to larger data sets, and thought that students may process this type of
relationship differently when trying to execute the problem. I also thought about what
student I wanted to interview. Also, after seeing the feedback from Dr. Edwards, I
decided to narrow down my assignment to 2 questions instead of the original 3, since
questions 1 and 3 were solved similarly. I planned to only give one problem unless the
student solved the first one quickly. As shown below, I only used one problem.
Since I lead a small group of 8th-grade boys at my church, I had a perfect
opportunity to interview one of them. There is one particular student who is very fond of
math, who we will call Jayden, so I decided to interview him and see how he interpreted
this problem. I asked Jayden if he was willing to help and then met with him later in the
week to perform the interview. Before we met, I made sure to review the possible
questions or responses that I may get in the interview.

Student’s Reasoning

When I met with Jayden, I first walked through the interview with him to help him
be comfortable with the process and to make sure there were no questions. I also made
sure he knew that I am looking closely at how he thinks, and not as close at if he gets the
right answer or not. When we were ready, I gave Jayden a piece of paper that had
question 1 written on it and asked him to begin solving. I also asked Jayden to share his
thought process out loud when working through the problem. Jayden sat there for a
second looking at the problem and then said “okay, I think I know how to do it. First, the
information here says that for every 100 people, 25 of them do not have food and shelter.
That means that the fraction of all the people in the world would be the same, since the
fractions are proportional, right?” I nodded and said that I can see how he got his answer,
then asked him to continue on. Jayden looked at the second part of the first problem for a
little bit longer and then began to work through it aloud. “Okay. So I think that I should
use the information from the last part to figure out this problem. I know that there are 25
people without food and shelter for every 100 people, and now I have to find how many
people are without food and shelter for every 7,000,000,000 people. I think I can keep
multiplying the fraction until the 100 is 7,000,000,000 and that should give me my
answer.” I asked Jayden what he meant by this. “Well, I know that the ratio is the same
whether there are 100 people or 7 billion people. So if I just make a fraction with 7
billion on the denominator, I have to find the numerator that makes the fraction equal to
25/100. I just divided 7 billion by 100 on my phone and got 70,000,000. So if I multiply
100 by 70,000,000 to get 7 billion, then I can also multiply 25 by 70,000,000 so that the
fractions are proportional. Then I get a fraction of 1,750,000,000 over 7 billion, so there
are 1,750,000,000 people in the world without food and shelter. So now I am done.” I
thanked Jayden for working through the problem and then told him that we were done.

Reflection and Analysis

When listening to Jayden’s thought process, I saw how he was able to look at this
problem and see relationships and structure, which relates to SMP’s 2, 7, and 8. Jayden
did an excellent job of picking up on these relationships and seeing how the two parts of
the first problem were connected. Instead of starting over his thought process, he could
build on what he has solved in the first part of the problem.
Jayden was thinking both descriptively by describing relationships between
the two sets of data and deducing as well as thinking logically in terms of knowing what
to do with the information he has figured out. I see how this type of problem relies a lot
on ratios and proportions, so I think that adding in activities or online manipulatives that
show how fractions are proportional and how we can use that to look at larger sets would
be very useful for this type of problem.
I see how my role as a listener in this interview can be directly translated into my
role of a teacher by having a mixture of both interpretive listening and hermeneutic
listening so that the student is able to explain his/her thought process while I am trying to
understand what the student as thinking, as well as being open to different ways to solve a
problem. While Jayden did solve this problem in a way that I had expected, there are also
other possible ways to solve this problem. By listening to how various students think, I
can better prepare myself for helping students solve problems in multiple ways.

Student Work