Yesterday, I was reading about Ros Wilson’s Big writing scheme in advance of a writing assessment at school. I was very interested to read how it developed over noticing trends over marking 20,000 extended writing pieces.
It reminded me of something I was taught at University – the wrong answer is often more important than the right answer, something I have mulled over for many years.
Today an opportunity presented itself to me – long addition with Year 4! I collated all the errors from over 1,000 sums answered by the children, and here are the findings.
37/1080 sums incorrect, due to;
Carrying digit under wrong column – 1
No carrying digit used -10
Error in basic addition – 11
Forgetting to add carrying digit – 15
In conclusion, from this incredibly small survey, the actual maths only accounted for a third of the errors, whereas the methodology used accounted for two thirds.
I wonder if any research company or organisation has carried this out in a much more large-scale survey, perhaps by collecting books from a range of ages, backgrounds and disciplines, and looking at not what has gone right, but what went wrong? I know this sounds like an incredibly negative thing to do, but my own little survey has highlighted the areas of weakness in my class, which can be simply addressed. I wonder how that would compare nationally, or even internationally?