Friday, November 17, 2006

11/17-quizzes

I did not realize how long it has been since I had last done this. I guess that I have been fighting through the last couple of weeks, looking for a break. It has gotten a bit chaotic and it seems to have caught up to me recently. I did try something new in class yesterday. It seemed to me that students have been struggling and going through the mations of being students and not trying to learn anything, especially my freshmen. I decided to give them a little quiz over what we have been talking about in class. The worked with partners and I had one student who struggled more thoughout the semester get out a piece of paper and a pencil. Their patner was a student who has been doing better throughout the year could not write during the quiz but had to help talk through the problem with the pair. Many of the students responded that this method of testing did cause them to talk more but others were upset that they could not just take control and write out the answers. Maybe it was a little more frustrating for some, but others loved the fact that they did not have to write. It seemed to accomplish the goal which was to get them talking about how to solve the problems, now I am interested to seem how they performed.

2 Comments:

Blogger Karl Fisch said...

Interesting. Let us know how they did - and how they feel after they know how they did.

3:13 PM  
Blogger MrsG said...

I have found that I can accomplish what you seem to be trying to do by having my eighth grade students write essays. For example, I might ask them to explain to me how they would solve a problem as if I were a student in the class. (This piggybacks well on how much of their in class work is "teaching" each other how to do practice problems). The students get very frustrated having to write everything out, however, their grades are often better because it gives me insight into why they are solving a problem the way they are solving it. Also, even if they do not get the final answer correct, they are often using the correct mathematical concepts, for which they earn partial credit.

5:46 PM  

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