Category: assessment

Data driven structure for exam prep

Item Analiysis

I have a Regents prep course (basically students that need to pass a New York State math exam in order to graduate) that I have been teaching all semester. These students are about six weeks away from the exam. I’ve decided to adopt a new structure to help them get over the hump of passing it. These kids are a challenging bunch, but their attendance is solid and they have good attitudes.

Every Monday, starting this past Monday, I will give them a simplified mock Regents exam. This will essentially be a diagnostic: it will not effect their final report card grade. My students usually buy into this pretty well. I will use the results of this assessment to identify which concepts we will focus on for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. During these days my co-teacher I will reteach and review these concepts, pretty much one concept a day to keep it simple and bite size. The following Monday we will repeat this process with an exam and using the rest of the week to tackle four more concepts (hopefully not needing to repeat those that we had previously relearned).

This targeted, structured, data-driven approach is something I’ve been seeking for this class for a little while. I’m consistently using data analysis for all my classes and I knew I was going to take this approach with them, I just didn’t know how it would look. Now I do.

After looking at the data from today’s exam a short time ago and mapping out the concepts for the week, I am really excited for the benefit this structure could provide my students.

Concepts for the first week:
1. Identifying trigonometric ratios from a given right triangle
2. Translating verbal statements into mathematical expressions
3. Basic operations on polynomials
4. Writing equations of lines and their graphs

Ready. Set. Go.

bp

Speed Dating

I’ve heard this strategy being used by several teachers in the MTBoS, but I most notably remember Kate Nowak being the one I heard it from first. It was a total success.

If you don’t know already, here’s the deal. Set up the classroom so that students are facing each other. Create a worksheet with problems you need the students to study/review. After handing it out, I gave the students a few minutes to become “masters” at one problem (I assigned them each a problem). I had 22 students, so I had 22 problems. After this, each student will “teach” their problem to the person across from them – for my problem set this was about 3 minutes (for both students to teach). After the 3 minutes, one side of the students got up and moved one seat to the left. Now they were across from a different classmate and the 3 minutes would start again – and each new pair would teach their problem. Each new pair now had a fresh start on explaining their problem and understanding a new one. (Sort of like real-world speed dating.) This process repeated until the end of the period. Oh, and I put out whiteboards on the tables to help with all this.

I floated around as they worked and assisted as necessary, but I wasn’t really part of the picture all that much. I loved this! I felt a bit weird in that I wasn’t doing much throughout the period. Then I came to my senses: it was the power of student-centered learning taking over me.

Because each student was only required to “master” one problem, they weren’t overwhelmed. And because they had to explain that question several times over the course of the class period, they really became well-versed on the concept that their problem related to. Conversely, because there was a student walking them through a problem they hadn’t seen before, I was able to incorporate peer tutoring and bring the learning to them in a more native way. They were talking about math all period – teaching and learning from one another – and hardly realized it.

It was totally my fault, but I didn’t get around to getting in an exit slip to gauge their thoughts on the activity. In fact, the bell rang as we were closing up. But if I had to guess from the looks of it, they really liked speed dating.

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