Let me guess, the descriptions are longer to write than trying to draw from the description?

Bingo.

2. You mention that students were frustrated with their partners even though their own definitions were imprecise and then you mention that the time waiting to do something is a limitation of the Functionary program. I feel that both problems could be helped by giving both students their own graphs at the beginning. Working on their own description gives them something to do while their partner writes. For many students getting back a description similar to their own and seeing how hard it is to work with an imprecise definition could help them recognize the problem with their own.

The benefit of seeing where their partner struggles with drawing the graph could be duplicated by recording the drawing attempt and playing it back.

So you’d have the following steps:
1. describe this graph
2. here’s your partner’s description of their graph, draw it
3. here’s how your partner understood your description
4. see if you can give your partner a better description (and so on)

The key being that the student would work with their partner’s description before seeing how their partner works with theirs.

I don’t think this would replace the point intervention you developed because I don’t think it would work for students who have wildly different initial description styles, but it could relieve some frustration in advance of the intervention. And being less frustrated could make waiting easier particularly if I’m right that this format would reduce the waiting in general.

Definitely liked how you broadened “correct” and “conventional” to include “precise” as well. Then how you infer building upon correct and precise to include conventional.

BTW, how did you figure out that L3 was battleship notation? Did the student explain herself or did you deduct it yourself? When I saw it, I was thinking that maybe it was making an L shape that started at the origin, went down to (0, -6) and ended at (3, -6). That is so cool.

I am happy for you and your accomplishments and I can’t wait to see how you implement changes based on your research’s findings.

In other words, it would be possible to do large, rigorous studies of motivation.

I can’t think of any prior study I’ve seen that actually tracks motivation. It always seemed to be considered a “soft” attribute not worthy of consideration, but besides it is hard to quantify.

What I find fascinating- Dan correct me here- is that the functionary group outperformed on item 2 “describing to a partner” the precise location of the coordinate?

Hi Scott, thanks for the note. The Functionary group outperformed at levels that were painfully close to significance (p = .0542, IIRC) on #2 but still statistically insignificant.