Writing Expressions from Tables
Anne M. Collins, Steven R. Benson · 2023
Writing an expression from a table presents many challenges for students. One challenge is in understanding which values to focus on. A student may look for the relationship between each input and its output or look for a recursive relationship in the output values, that is, how each subsequent value in the output is related to the output that precedes it. Another challenge for students is when the input values do not increase consecutively. To overcome these challenges, students need multiple opportunities to work with a variety of tables in which the input grows in a variety of ways, for example, inputs placed in the table randomly so that students must rewrite the table in numerical order, skip counting in the input so students must look at the ratio between the output and the input, and tables in which the input grows consecutively.