South East 1 Math: Critically Looking At Questions and Tests

The Grade 7 FOS PLC's used their time together today to look at the resources that we use, and then evaluate them on how effective they are. We know that in our schools we have textbooks, ministry guides and supplemental activities, but there is not one "just right" resource. So what do we do?

We started our session by looking at an activity sheet from one of the textbooks that are in our schools.

Each teacher then looked at the questions (individually) and then we shared how we would mark each question. When sharing, some people shared why they gave a question a specific mark (e.g., There were 4 things, so I gave 4 marks).

After doing this, we then used the achievement chart to decide what type of question each of the printed questions were. It became very obvious to us that we had a lot of KU type questions and not a lot of communication type questions. When we converted this into percent, it turned out that at least 40 - 50% of our questions were just KU. We had some really good discussions which included things like: If the question did.....or In my class they would..... - But, we were only taking things for face value - If it only shows Knowledge, then it only shows Knowledge.

After noticing what types of questions were on the sheet, we then turned to our curriculum to then have us see what expectations we were covering. The questions that were not covered by the expectation were then crossed off.

What we also discovered was that one of the 4 expectations found under Location and Movement in the GSS strand was not covered at all in this activity.

The teachers then broke off into groups (1 group in the AM, 2 groups in the PM) and then picked one of the questions that was in the curriculum and then "opened it" up more. This allowed us to have a really good question that focused on more than just one type of question - it was a question that could be used to help assess all four quadrants in the curriculum.