MPM1D1 - Day 44 Test Day

We had our second test today. Students seemed well prepared in general. I had a few say to me as they came in that they were going to fail, but this seems to be a normal approach for these students (which is kind of sad). It turns out they did alright.

I was very pleased with how well most did on the question about finding the equation of a line between two points. I often talk about this being the most difficult part of the course, but many of them said that they found it easy.

There are a few things that we need to work on, mostly number sense (exponents and solving equations) but we have lots of time to come back to these ideas. I'm also questioning how I assess. The test is a great place to assess the thinking, problem solving and communication skills but I'm wondering if smaller, more frequent (formative?) quizzes  might be a better option for assessing knowledge. What I mean by this is that most students seem to be able to solve an equation when given a context and as part of a bigger problem. They seem to be able to reason their way to the answer and they can check to see that it make sense. But, if I strip away the context and ask them to just solve a two step equation, a good number of them will struggle. We'll keep plugging away at it.