Summary of Quadratics Pre-Test

Most of my students (Willamette cohorts) still need to learn the quadratic equation which is a huge part of this unit. I will need to find a song or a rhyme for them to make it easier to remember. Students did well solving equations, so that made me feel that I am focusing more on the work and not enough on the importance of it and why they need to know it. Most students at this level know how to solve equations, so it is important that I focus on why quadratics are different and what they need to be looking out for.

Overall I was pleased with the results of the pre-test. I gave my pre-test to my actual students yesterday and they did very poorly (which I expected). Most of them got the true/false and multiple choice questions and missed everything else. I think one person got any question right outside of those and I have tested about 20 students so far. Since most students haven't learned about quadratics before I will be teaching a new concept so it will be fun to see how well everyone does. I have a lot of work to do in the coming weeks as I go teach my work sample.

Here is a link to my results from my cohorts. I had my students in class take it as a paper test.

Video of Teaching Warm-Ups

Here is a link to my warm up video. I couldn't figure out how to email it to you all. The quality is pretty good but I am using a new program so I did not know this was the way it would turn out. You can't see much. Sorry. It picks up a few minutes in, but you don't miss much. My teacher is putting the screen together so that is why it starts out with a computer desktop screen. We are reviewing scientific notation that we learned in the last class. I think that the biggest strengths in my teaching of warm ups were that I made students explain everything and answer the questions so that it wasn't just me talking the whole time and explaining. I got a good sense of how much information they retained. The evidence of student learning was in the responses. I don't think there was a lot of activity and engagement, so I think it seemed like there was less than there really is. I don't think many of the students were engaged, you couldn't see but there were about 20 students in the class and it sounded like there were four. I am really struggling at this school because students are not very active in class. They mostly expect to be taught and not respond. My role in supporting learning was to help lead students to the right answer when they were struggling to find the answer. One challenge that I observed was that there was a lot of wasted time waiting for students to answer and respond. I need to find a way to be more engaging to students who are not used to being active in class. Most of the other teachers just lecture the whole class while everyone is quiet. The typical mistakes students made were mostly due to focus. Students tended to guess on a lot of answers instead of thinking. I could tell they were reluctant to answer due to lack of confidence and that many of the students are shy. I would revise this routine by maybe starting out with something fun or just me having more energy in general. Engaging the students early and setting the tone for the whole class would help improve the warm-ups and the entire class.

Algebra 2 Quadratics Pre-Test

Here is a link to my pre-test. I will try to get it on here, but click the link just in case. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated because this is the one I plan on using for my class. If it sends you to the spreadsheet, just click on forms and "go to live form" and it should appear in the way where you could take the test.