Additional Materials
Materials Required
Estimated Time Needed
(Times are approximate and will depend on the needs of the students.)
Set this task, in class or for homework, a few days before the formative assessment lesson. This will give you an opportunity to assess the work, to find out the kinds of difficulties students have with it. You will then be able to target your help more effectively in the follow-up lesson.
It is important that, as far as possible, students are allowed to answer the questions without your assistance.
Students should not worry too much if they cannot understand or do everything, because in the next lesson they will engage in a similar task, which should help them. Explain to students that by the end of the next lesson, they should expect to be able to answer questions like these confidently. This is their goal.
Collect students' responses to the task, and make some notes on what their work reveals about their current levels of understanding. The purpose of doing this is to forewarn you of the difficulties students will experience during the lesson itself, so that you may prepare carefully.
We suggest that you do not score students' work. The research shows that this will be counterproductive as it will encourage students to compare their scores, and will distract their attention from the mathematics.
Instead, you can help students to make progress by asking questions that focus attention on aspects of their work. Some suggestions for these are given on the next page. These have been drawn from common difficulties in trials of this unit.
We suggest that you write your own list of questions, based on your own students' work, using the ideas that follow. You may choose to write questions on each student's work. If you do not have time to do this, you could write a few questions that will help the majority of students. These can then be displayed on the board at the end of the lesson.
Student confuses the terms "horizontally" and "vertically."
Student translates rather than reflect the shape (Q1b).
Student confuses the terms "clockwise" and "counterclockwise."
Student ignores the center of rotation and rotates from a corner of the shaded triangle.
Student uses an inefficient combination of transformations.
Student correctly answers all the questions.