Test Review

So I was the super wise teacher giving 3 unit tests in one day.  I think I did pretty good though - the Physics students got theirs back the next day and the 50+ Grade 9 tests took less than a week.  Not bad.  

It was the first major test for the Grade 9s in High School Science and the first unit test for the Grade 12s so I wanted to make sure they felt prepared and calm going into the test.  Last year I had a student experience a panic attack before she even saw the test!  I'm not that scary I swear!

We had our Learning Goal Tracker, our test outlines and our review bookmarks (print out their review questions on strips of colorful paper - easy and SO effective).  I am really stressing cooperative learning so we did this little activity too.  It's like a gallery walk, students read the skill/goal they will be assessed on during the test, and they put a circle of where they think they lie ranging from "What?", "I need more practice" (Level 1), "I still have a few questions" (Level 2), "Got it :)" (Level 3) up to "I could teach Mrs. B a thing or two about this!" (Level 4).

Many felt they needed more practice on this topic, so that's exactly what we did!

Students went around the room where I had posted about 15 or so of these tabloid pages and marked where they felt they were at.  They really liked the Sample Questions at the bottom, and and LOVED that I let them take pictures of the pages.  

You can see some members didn't feel great about the topic, but with heterogeneous groups they had a group member to help them out. 

Where is the cooperative learning portion?  Well, each group had the same color of crayon, so they had to do another lap and see where their group was for these goals.  I also went around and discussed and mentioned things like "oh, the purple group had some students that need some more practice - good thing you've got an expert in there who thinks they can teach me about that topic!"  The kids could also use these while they were doing their review and made for some great conversations.  

They all felt really good about this one!

Was it worth my time?  Absolutely!  I still have to crunch the numbers, but it looks like these Grade 9s and 12s did better than last years group with what I would say are slightly more difficult unit tests.