Lesson Review for Fractions Chapter 2

[munamenuga]

Hey everyone. I just completed a review on the Fractions: Chapter 2. I would love to hear your thoughts on this review @seanlip @everyone.

Here’s the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZryBIvxCG95hWOPSgUyf4OROp-jl_Eqt1_1DqjaWhuA/edit

Sidebar: I noticed that Oppia uses alternate spellings for some words and I have been wondering how that affects learners who are being educated for the first time and learners who use the alternate spelling in their local environment.
I don’t know if this big enough to be an issue, more of an observation. Tell me what you guys think? Have you observed this?

[seanlip]

Thanks @munamenuga. I quite like your suggestions, and I think this is one of the more well-developed review documents I've read so far.

Here are some more specific comments:

I'm not sure about your suggestion for row 4. This is meant to be a picture of a cake that a student might legitimately encounter, and cakes might not be nicely divided into half to begin with. You could however suggest adding additional questions before this one if you think the on-ramp is too steep. That would be a valid pedagogical suggestion and, if you go this route, it would be interesting to see what questions you write and how you present them.

Be careful about introducing new vocabulary. Each long word can also be an added opportunity for the student to stumble or get confused.

When you have multiple suggestions in a single row, I think that they could be organized more clearly. For example, one common piece of feedback I've been giving is that, on reading the suggestions, I don't know exactly what edits I'm supposed to make. In the case of your first row, I can't tell whether the suggestion in point 3 is meant to address the issues you noted in points 1 and 2, or if it's separate (in which case, my feedback about having a more specific suggestion for point 2 would apply).

For row 2, just FYI, we normally have at least 4 options for multiple-choice questions because otherwise it's too easy to randomly guess (we saw this behaviour often with students when we were trialling the lessons in India).

Your proposed suggestions for row 3 are great, but try to pay a little more attention to the details. For example, there should be a comma after "half of that chocolate cake" (before the closing quotation mark), and a comma between "said" and "surprised", and a space between "Mr." and "Baker", etc. As I've mentioned in the feedback I've given others, we would like to see how you write, and whether you would be able to make lesson edits that can be directly published to learners without further need for correction.

On the question of how names are spelled: there is a large diversity in names around the world, and what is familiar to one learner will not be familiar to another. So I am not sure there is a good way to have a one-size-fits-all solution here. This is something we've discussed before in the lesson creation team and we are a bit torn between (a) optimizing for familiarity to the student and (b) being fine with using different names, especially in an increasingly global society where people are more exposed to folks with diverse names from all over the world. We've tended to lean a bit more towards (b), but I do see the arguments either way.

Again, thanks for your submission, and I hope the above helps!

[munamenuga]

Thank you for the feedback @seanlip. I went over the lesson again and I incorporated everything you mentioned. I also added a new card with a proposed question for row 4 because I genuinely think that the on-ramp for that question was too steep.

Please take a look,
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZryBIvxCG95hWOPSgUyf4OROp-jl_Eqt1_1DqjaWhuA/edit

Thanks for explaining the air around the name spellings too. I think the reasons for b are very valid.