I kept concept quizzes this year, and kept the clear delineation between skills. Did you end up switching to “I’ll tell you what’s on this sheet but you need to figure out what you need to use on each problem”? Any updates on how that went? Either here or over at the current discussion. Thanks.

My personal teaching philosophy is that the skills are a toolkit and, due in no small part to my own nightmare that was high school where I didn’t realize I had to carry the skills forward and not just dump them, I try to teach my students in a cumulative manner. They have to decide on the mechanism for solving the problem using each of the skill pieces that we’ve been reviewing.

If I were a math teacher, I’d teach law of sines and law of cosines, but then would spend a lot of time in class on a triangle with two sides labeled and how to create the mechanism for solving the problem where the first step would be identifying which piece of the toolkit (law of sines or cosines?) should be used and the second piece would then be successful execution. I call it a “game plan”.

I think what I am going to try next year is concept quizzes as quizzes, with grade replacement. And then on my test it will be the (Bloom’s taxonomy) evaluation piece of creating the correct game plan along with the proper execution of the individual pieces which the students should have taken ownership for learning, as there will be at least two if not more quizzes before a test.

I’m not yet ready to give up tests. It is not that I like aggregation so much as the fact that the skills of chemistry require aggregation. In science, the ability to break down a larger problem into smaller, easily handled pieces (identifying variables to turn in to an experiment from a complex observation, for example) is at its very heart.

On the other hand, I’ve seen an Alg 2 teacher’s grade book (his desk is beside mine in the faculty workroom) and it does read in terms of chapters. So I completely see where you are coming from, Dan.

With it being between only two choices, you might have to have a few on there so you know that they understand what to use and when, but at least that would give you an indication that they know which to use.

Then you can add problems to see if they know *how* to use the Laws.

Furthermore I use your how math must assess idea. So i have 4 goals to test. One for each of the techniques and one for the mixed form (this is worth double the points).

Still and all, this bugs me:

Johnny’s gotten a 5 on Law of Sines, but a 3 on Law of Cosines. Will he still be able to cross off concept 26?

Presumably, if Johnny has passed Law of Sines, he’ll recognize it and not do it. Presumably.

Having the motivation for mastery intertwined with the assessment system seemed key in your original writeup. Next year, how will students test out of a concept?

Johnny’s gotten a 5 on Law of Sines, but a 3 on Law of Cosines. Will he still be able to cross off concept 26? Will he have to be able to label the problem as the concept? Will you still give the concept number on the top of your quizzes or not?

(I’ve adopted the concept quiz strategy for some of my classes this year and need to pull it off better next year. So these questions are one’s I’ll be trying to sort out too.)