Transcript One Question Assessment

One Question Assessment
What is it ?
This is what happens when a
completely non-structured question
is asked in order to determine if the
criteria for a particular achievement
standard have been reached.
An example of this for 91256
A plastics manufacturing company is launching a new logo.
The company will print versions of this logo on a wide range
of product shapes and sizes, for example, a 1 m radius
curved tube or an A3 size sheet. They would like to make
sure that the elements of a given logo do not overlap the
company name.
The new logo is a circumscribed triangle (a triangle inside a circle
that passes through all three vertices). The name of the company
is written on the diameter of the circle which is parallel to the
longest side of the triangle, with letters one fifth of the radius of
the circle high. For example, if the radius of the circle is 20 cm, the
letters should be 4 cm high.
The company's printer knows that the size of the circle will be
determined by the locations of the triangle vertices, and the
centre of the circle will always be at the intersection of
perpendicular bisectors of the sides of the triangle, as shown.
For interest I gave this problem to my
scholarship class, five of whose members
already have scholarships, three of them
Outstanding.
The result was that most simply couldn’t get
their heads around it. I would have completely
had to change the way I taught for them to
extract any benefit at all. This is direct contrast
to what occurs when you give a class like this a
problem from the Eton or Australian Maths
Contests when they immediately get stuck into
the problem and the really good ones
come up with highly imaginative and
creative solutions.
What happened when this was
promoted
Many mathematics teachers felt really
despondent. Their feelings of frustration really
peaked when the powers that be floated the
idea of one question assessment for the greatly
diminished number of external standards. The
criticisms of this method of assessment
What’s wrong with one question ?
(i) Unstructured questions have always proved
the most difficult for even the ablest
students. Most students simply have no idea
about how to tackle problems like these;
(ii) The level of English required is way beyond
that of many students in our schools;
(iii) The marking of such assessments is very,
very tedious and error prone.
What happened
The arguments against this mad initiative became so
strong that NZQA released on Dec 2 the following
statement which was part of
A2011/019 - 02 Dec 2011
There are many ways in which evidence of achievement
can be collected and the approach in the MOE’s
assessment materials is not the only approach that can
be used. Any assessment material(s) that gives
students the opportunity to demonstrate their ability
against the achievement criteria of the standard
is acceptable for moderation purposes.
Bearing this in mind
I present assessment activities which in my
opinion are perfectly OK for 91256, 91257 and
91258. If they’re not all right then no doubt
NZQA will let us know but if you use them you
won’t have to spend a vast amount of time
marking them nor will you have to change what
you have successfully taught in the past in order
to meet the wishes of some theoretician trying
to change the world.
Final note before I run through the
assessment activities
Last year created a web site www.nceax.co.nz to
allow students to practise for the externals. I
based the material in the site on the exemplars
produced for the externals. I got 10000 visitors
to the site in the month before the exam with
over a gigabyte of traffic in that period. I have
nearly completed material for all level 1 exams
based on those of last year and will shortly have
material based on the exemplars for level 2.
Please visit the site, currently it is unchanged
from last year, in about a month when the site
will be greatly increased from last year. If you
want electronic copies of today’s material I will
place it on this site in a day or two. If you wish
to correspond with me via email my email
address is [email protected] . I really do look
forward to corresponding with you.