Chapter 4 Quiz (Days 26-27)

Today in Stats class, I give the first quiz of the year. The quiz covers Chapter 4 of the text, which is on Exploring Quantitative Data.

Before the quiz, I continue Sarah Carter's idea to do a different dot plot everyday. Since today's Thursday, I choose Carter's topic from last Thursday, "How many concerts have you attended in your lifetime?" But my classes continue to shrink as some students are transferring to another school -- now my fifth period class has just three students, in addition to the single student in my first period. And of this quartet, two of them have seen just one concert while the others haven't seen anyway. So this doesn't lend itself to a very strong dot plot. Carter's idea of dot plots based on the students' data is excellent, but my classes are so tiny.

In fact, the superintendent has contacted our school and informed us that three of the classes here are too small and need to be combined. Naturally, this includes my Stats classes. Of course, it's not as simple as just combining the two rosters -- if my lone first period student switches to fifth period, he'll need to move out of his fifth period art class -- and he might not be able to fit art into his new schedule. As usual, I'll post on the blog if and when this change finally occurs.

Just like for the first test two weeks ago, I review on markers and whiteboards before the quiz. As for the assessment itself, I combine two quizzes from the online test bank and post it on Illuminate. Again I have to modify some of the questions -- the questions where they must create a histogram can't really be done on Illuminate (though I retain the stem-and-leaf plot questions, which can be typed in ASCII). One question asks students to find the mean and standard deviation of a set of 15 numbers -- I decide that this is a bit too tricky, so I remove the standard deviation part. But there are still constructed response questions about the standard deviation and when it is appropriate.

As I wrote earlier on the blog, I want my quizzes to be worth 75 points. The two quizzes combined have eight questions. One of them has five parts (a five-number summary) and another has ten parts (some vocabulary matching), so that's a natural fifteen points. Then the six constructed response questions can be worth ten points each/ But this was tricky to enter in Illuminate -- even though I can enter numbers like five and ten for the weights, the actual score I can give for each question only goes up to four. So if someone gets, say, six out of ten vocabulary words, I won't know how to enter 6/10 for the score.

I'm not sure how well my Stats students do on the test yet. On the other hand, I'm now using DeltaMath for the Calculus quiz on Sections 2.1-2.4 (limits), and the computer grades these right away. So I already know that of my five Calculus students (with one girl absent), one guy gets 14/15 (that is, 70/75) and one girl earns 12/15, but the other scores out of fifteen are 9, 7, and a dreadful 2. I can't tell whether the low scores are due to ineffective teaching on my part, or laziness on the students' part. Most likely it's a combination of both.

Tomorrow, the Ethnostats students also have a quiz. But I'll do one last dot plot with them (not necessarily on number of concerts attended), and I'll post that dot plot on Twitter.

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