This time of year always has me and my colleagues thinking about the way we cumulatively assess our students in the PBL courses. Since cooperation and problem solving are so important to us we are committed to having some type of collaborative experience as part of the final “exam” but we also have a committment to assessing the content knowledge as well. It’s a difficult thing to balance though, as many of you know. However, since we have come to the decision that this course is really about depth and not breadth, we do not believe that the main focus should be on testing memorization of fact or to see if they can do “one of every problem” that we covered this year.

We have split our two hour final “exam” into a group problem solving experience from which the students receive part of their exam grade (and they turn in one paper as a group). The rest of the exam grade comes from an individual 40-minute performance they do on their own. In general, the grades come out very much as we expect for individual students. During the group problem solving part (approximately one hour and 20 minutes), the teachers walk around and observe the interactions in the groups – who’s leading, who’s following, who’s just sitting back and others do the work. This factors into their grade. We also allow students to give feedback into how the group worked together and for alternative answers if they require it.

If anyone has questions about the way we write questions or would like to talk about assesment in PBL, please post some questions in the Forum about it. Looking forward to doing some more work about assessment in my course at the PEA conference this summer.

This is an old blog post from 2010

An inspiration colleague from Canada sent me a great link today to this amazing animated presentation about teaching math. I am going to try to embed it here in this blog entry and see what happens.

I had an interesting conversation with some students in my senior elective the other day. These students had taken our PBL algebraic geometry course two years ago as sophomores, and now are in a seminar-based senior elective, and of course, close to graduation. As our department is transitioning our Trigonometry materials into our third-year math course this spring, it is becoming apparent to our school community that this PBL curriculum has now infilitrated another course.

When the seniors in my current class found out that the new course was going in this direction they had a surprising reaction. “No fair,” one girl commented. I was dumbfounded. She was expressing her anger that whe she took this course last year it did not have a PBL curriculum. “How come it wasn’t taught that way last year?” Still in shock, it took me a while to digest the fact that the students were reacting this way. At the time that these students were in our Algebraic Geometry course, I heard many complaints about how difficult it was to work with the PBL curriculum and how much they wished it was more”traditional”, however now in rerospect they seemed jealous that this new class got to use it.

This actually is not surprising. What I have found anecdotally from talking to alumnae from my school who have gone through some of the PBL curriculum, is that once they are out of the moment, they can look back and realize that it was one of the best learning experiences of their high school math time. They realize that the accountability that they were held to was part of what was good for them and the high expectations of accessing their own prior knowledge was empowering. These students validated this idea for me and confirmed what we doing was the right thing.

So far it seems to be going pretty well in our second course. We are finding lots of typos and rewriting will be necessary, of course, this summer. However, overall, it seems to be agreeing with the students who have gone through the experience last year. Hopefully, when they look back, in retrospect, they’ll be able to see the value in it as well.

Welcome to my website that should serve as a resource for all those interested in Problem-Based Learning and related information about Mathematics Education.

During my time teaching, sharing in professional development and studying, I have found that the majority of mathematics educators are looking for different ways to meet their goals for students other than the traditional pedagogical approaches that typically are encountered in the mathematics classroom. Although educators realize the need for change in instructional approaches, they may not always have the opportunity, insight or ability to create that change on their own. I have enjoyed sharing my experiences and advice with my fellow educators through professional development workshops, casual communications, my previous blog writing, and other means of spreading the word of progressive mathematics education.

My hope is for this website to be my conduit for my work to the virtual educational community in order to facilitate communication of information and ideas. Please feel free to look around, read, think and hopefully it will foster some ideas that will inspire you.