Late last year, via Twitter, a discussion revolved around how to give AP Stats students more and regular experience with multiple choice questions. One idea put forth by @druink was to have an MC Monday experience. She shared a form she created and asked for input and collaboration around the viability of the form: number of questions, student reflection, etc.
I wanted to use the form but tweak it some more to allow me to track both general student progress as well as progress in the four strands of the AP Stats curriculum: Exploring data, Generating data, Probability and Inference methods. Part of this is to complete my teacher evaluation student growth component, but also to help me see if there are areas that need revisiting later in the course (of course, there always are, but in the past it was hit or miss rather than data driven).
One hindrance for tracking via components was how to identify each question easily so it didn’t become a time-suck. In addition, I needed a reasonably easy way to generate questions that were essentially at the AP level. So my department purchased a new ExamView test generator for our text which already had the questions identified by the AP standards. I also found that GradeCam can assign a learning target to questions. Unfortunately, the available targets were CCSS or state standards; luckily, in the CCSS there are “almost matching” statements around the 4 big strands, so I could label questions. Because I have been using GradeCam for unit tests as well as Midterms and Finals, students are very comfortable with the process of scanning their answers for me.
So today was the first day of trying out the process and I think it went great! Now I’ll be able to track long-term retention of the key ideas as well as monitor individual students’ growth (or lack there of).
soar180year2 