Algebra Case Study Martha

Martha is a 14-year-old ninth grade student who is having trouble with basic algebra. She has a great attitude towards school and she enjoys going. Martha has a great relationship with her peers and enjoys working in groups. She tries very hard to but has problems answering problems on paper when working alone. In order to prepare her for higher-level algebra, Martha has to improve her basic skills to the required level of proficiency.
Martha has three goals that she must master by the end of the school year. The goals and strategies are:
1. Martha will be able to use strategies to improve her basic skills in math and allow her to be at a level of proficiency or above level by the end of the school year. The strategy that would be efficient for this goal is the concrete-representation-abstract method. In this method Martha will be able to understand a concept before memorizing the algorithms. She will interact and manipulate three dimensional objects such as cubes, counters, algebra tiles, etc. which gives an understanding of the concept. This stage is the most influential stage because in order to move on to stage two she must master stage one. In the representation stage of the method she will use two dimensional

Martha will be able to remember the steps used when applying basic skills to correctly solve equations with 80% accuracy by the end of the school term. She will take the basic facts that she knows and learn how to apply them to improve her basic skills. A strategy to be used to remember how to apply the facts to different algebraic problems is mnemonic devices. Martha can create mnemonic for her to recall the steps or rules that are needed to complete problems. A good mnemonic that would be beneficial for Martha to use is PEMDAS (Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally) which stands for parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction which helps to remember the order of operations and which operation to use