My SSDD Problems website is here: sddproblems.com
More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now some of you may be aware of my work with what i call ssd problems and that stands for same surface different deep so these are problems which on the surface look quite similar maybe they’ve got a key common feature but their deep structures are different so on the screen is the first set of ssdd problems that i ever wrote and even before you look deeply at this if you just glance you’ll notice that surface feature that’s common they’ve got this isosceles triangle as you start to read these problems you may also notice other surface features that are similar for example this question here talks about area this question here also talks about area but if you pause the video and study these problems you’ll notice their deep structures are very very different what you can also do with ssdd problems is take a more focused area in my case of mathematics and look at different deep structures within that area so here i’ve got percentages and again a quick glance you’ll notice are surface features this time everything’s to do with percentage the either the word percentage or the percentage symbol is in everything but we’ve also got this 12 and seven and the money being surface features but students have to sift through those surfaces to try and get to the deep structures lying beneath and once again if you pause the video and consider these questions you’ll realize that the deep structures even though they’re within the domain of percentages are very different and this led me to create my website ssddproblems.com where i house all of these sets of problems that have been created by teachers all around the world so why do i think ssdd problems are a key component in the practice diet of students well there are four reasons for this the first is as kind of a bit of a freebie you get the spacing effect so instead of giving students four questions based on the thing that they’ve literally just studied almost kind of without being able to avoid it you’re exposing students to things that they’ve learned at some point in the past so let’s imagine here i’ve just taught my students pythagoras well by giving them this set of ssdd problems i’m also compelling them to retrieve knowledge about area of triangles forming expressions and angle facts so you get the spacing effect which we know is great for memory but you get more than that as well you get what’s known in the literature as attention attenuation that basically means students cannot operate on autopilot you know when you get those sets of questions where once you’ve done one you’ve done them all that’s certainly not the case with ssdd problems once you’ve done one question you better switch back on to try and figure out that second question because a different method is going to be required third you get what’s known as the discriminative contrast this is potentially the most powerful benefit i think of ssdd problems and that is students are compelled to compare the questions and ask themself what’s the same what’s different and how does that determine how i’m going to approach the problem to try and solve it if these problems look completely different you wouldn’t get that discriminative contrast because the questions would be so different that you wouldn’t be able to really make those comparisons or they won’t be as useful whereas if they’ve got this consistent surface feature either in terms of context or in this case an image you’ve got to say okay i can see that’s the same but what’s different that means i’m going to approach this problem let’s say using forming and solving equations whereas this problem i’m going to approach using pythagoras theorem and so on and the final benefit and i think this is quite an interesting one they reduce new learning interference so what i mean by that is and i don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this but you teach your students a new idea and they start applying that idea left right and center so let’s say for example i’ve just taught my students pythagoras theorem that’s fantastic they’re really good at pythagoras but what they then start doing is applying pythagoras where it shouldn’t be applied for example in to solve a problem like this whereas by doing ssdd problems it forces again students to do this discriminative contrast to make and i think as an added benefit to that it makes sure that anything they’ve learned in the past or anything sorry that they learn now hopefully won’t interfere with concepts that they were securing um in the past so that’s why i use ssdd problems as a regular part of my students practice is that useful to you and in any way do you use ssdd problems in the same way as me or in different ways if you’re not a maths teacher could you make use of ssdd problems at all if you found this useful i’d be so grateful if you could like the video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel and and visit tipsforteachers.com uk for more tips like this thanks so much for watching