A short YouTube training video (creator: Rob Langman, presenter: Zoe) providing teacher guidance and two classroom assessment tasks to probe pupils’ understanding of time. The first is an open-ended task asking pupils to put durations (a second, a minute, an hour, a day) into personal context to compare and reason about scale; the second targets a common decimal/time misconception, showing that 3.2 hours equals 3 hours 12 minutes (0.2 of 60 = 12), not 3 hours 20 minutes. The material is aimed at primary teachers assessing depth of conceptual understanding and readiness for secondary-school calculator use.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Zoe and in this video we're going to be looking at examples of greater depth problems you can use to assess pupils understanding of working with time. So here's our first one. You can see it's an open ended task. Open ended tasks are great when you want to know exactly where pupils are because they can only tell you what they know. However, do be careful because some pupils given an open ended task is too open. They just don't know where to start. So here we have four durations of time and we want pupils to put it into context. What do they think they can accomplish in those amounts of time? This is great because it really gets them to embed it in their own understanding, their own life. Here what we're wanting is them to compare these durations and really get to grips with what they know. So we've got a minute, a second, an hour, a day, a and hopefully you get a variety of answers. You can explore those answers with the whole class maybe getting some of the pupils working at greater depth to come up with whether they think that's right. Hopefully supportively you can then go to close questions. So if a sneeze takes one second, how many could you do in a minute or half a minute say or if their favourite program is half an hour long, how many could they watch in one day? Again relating it to them, putting it into context really embeds that learning. Now our second problem. A big misconception. Decimals and time. So here's our question. 3.2 hours is the same as 3 hours and 20 minutes. True or false, for some of our pupils they'll go true. Why is it true? Because 3.20 is the same as 3 hours and 20 minutes. They've simply put the placeholder in. The problem we've got with this is time is not base 10. We have not got 100 minutes in an hour, otherwise this would be true. 60 minutes in an hour. We're hoping then that they start to look at the decimal. They've got 2/10, 2/10 of 60. So this is what they're going to be working out. 1/10 of 60 is 6:2. 10 then is 12, so that is 12 minutes. So instead of 3 hours and 20 it's actually 3 hours and 12 minutes. Another way they could approach it is that they should know hopefully 0.2 is the same as a fifth. A fifth of 60 again gets us to 12. This is a particular area for misconceptions for pupils and it's very useful for when they go up into secondary school and they start using a calculator for using time. They have to understand that that is not the same. So there we have it. Two activities you can use with a range of pupils to assess where they are with working with time.
