Free Responses and Projects

Going into this school year, my intention was to resume blogging regularly. I wrote my first post back in September, but now it’s been a month and a half. My hope had been to write biweekly. Anyway, I won’t bore any readers with the reasons.

If you read my last post, my plan was to change my assessments significantly. And, so far, I have followed through on that. I have given three tests all have been made up of only Free Response Questions. The students have completed one project and will do one more before Thanksgiving. My thought right now is to give a multiple choice assessment before the end of the semester. But that will be the only one.

I just finished grading the last test and it appears that the students are getting better at answering the Free Response Questions.

The next project will be on data gathering techniques. The students, working in pairs, will have to choose a topic, create a questionnaire, devise a sampling strategy, and discuss bias. Their population will have to be found within our school so that they can select the sample and distribute their questionnaires. The questionnaires will be made online using Google Forms. The data they collect can be used for future projects or assessments.

The sixth Free Response Question on the AP Statistics exam is always a longer one called an Investigative Task. My plan is to try to set the project up in some ways like an extended investigative task. I will try to make it so that in the process of doing the project, they will have to address the same sorts of issues that might arise on an investigative task.

Anyway, that’s what’s going on for now.