Saturday, March 21, 2015

Transformations Test

I work with a lot of Geometry teachers in my consulting work and the question of assessment comes up a lot.  I have made a point of making my classroom a place where we focus on understanding and reasoning as opposed to number-crunching and doing math without context.

I wrote this assessment back in September and used it as my unit test on transformations, but I didn't realize how many teachers would find it useful. So, here it is!!  By far, it is the one assessment that I am most proud of because I feel as though it is a genuine representation of what I find important: balance.  You will notice that there are some procedurally driven questions, but also lots of questions that asses student understanding of the concepts.

In the past, when I would write assessments, I would do my best to come up with a clever extra credit question that was challenging, but doable, so long as students extended their understanding of the given topic.  Oddly enough, I rarely had students even attempt the extra credit question because they thought it was too hard.  That was NOT the case on this test.  I would say that 80% of my students tried it and of those who attempted it, more than 50% of them got it right!  I could not have been happier!

So, take a look, let me know what you think.  I'd love to hear your ideas for additional/other questions, what has worked for you, and any other nuggets of wisdom you have to share.

Link to the Test

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