Scoring a PT Response on Abstraction

From a team of teachers in the Iowa Region:

Question for the group here, as [we] are stumped. In Unit 3, Lesson 7, there is a Practice PT (bubble 11) that asks the students to score a PT Response. Our question is, why is the selected part NOT a student developed abstraction?

Is the rationale here that non-examples can be as helpful as actual examples? I perceive that the question is revealing that they are wanting for an actual example. Where can they turn for that?

Great question!

The example shows a student stringing together several built-in functions (moveTo(), arcRight()), etc. Because the student did not write these functions themselves, they are not an example of abstraction. However, the explanation counts, because the student explains how the parameters generalize those functions. I found this question to be a really good example for students as it caught most of them by surprise, but was a common issue I saw when grading the PT. Sometimes seeing what isn’t a good answer is just as valuable as a perfect answer.

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