In this post, I discuss how I introduce extraneous solutions and how I have students explore them more with graphing calculators (although Desmos could be used as well). Resources are included.

A couple weeks ago, I gave my students a worksheet on things related to radicals. As I went through the sheets, I noticed a LOT of common errors; errors that I knew they shouldn’t be making. It could have been due to carelessness or rushing in some cases, but either way I wanted an effective way to address the errors. I decided to create a “Fix the Error” worksheet based directly on the errors I saw. Here is the original problem set and the “Find Your Error” worksheet, which worked out really well in class!