Earlier in this video series, students transformed quadratic expressions from standard form into factored form. There, the factored expressions are products of two sums, (x + m)(x + n), or two differences, (x – m)(x – n). Students continue that work in this video lesson, extending it to include expressions that can be rewritten as products of a sum and a difference, (x + m)(x – n).

Through repeated reasoning, students notice that when we apply the distributive property to multiply out a sum and a difference, the product has a negative constant term, but the linear term can be negative or positive (MP8). Students make use of structure as they take this insight to transform quadratic expressions into factored form (MP7).

Algebra 1, Episode 16: Unit 7, Lesson 7 | Illustrative Math