Reflection and justification of assesment

JUSTIFICATION: 
As a future teacher I know quizzes are inevitable, and one day I will probably grow to love them; however, as a current student I hate them. Keeping my hate for quizzes and their uselfulness as an assessment tool in the back of my mind I began to design this activity. I also kept in mind that we had gone over the material almost a week ago and it was getting to the nitty gritty part of the semester where we are all learning different things that will all be on a test next week. I also kept in the back of my mind that as students we recieved  a bunch of information in a short period of time. Not only did we have to teach ourselves and seven other people a new statistical method we also learned seven other methods. I looked at this task as a way to assess knowledge without torturing students and making them rack their brains for numbers that more than likely they don't remember; however, they needed to remember the key points of the lecture.

There was a quiz portion that assessed the students basic knowledge of the t-test. They had to chomp a few numbers, but the main point of the questions were to determine if they understood what the final number meant. One of the corner stones of the lesson was that you can use a t-test to determine if 2 means are statistically different or not. To do this you have to take a p-value and be able to use the sample size, a confidence interval, and a significance table. These tools make it simple to determine if you ned to worry about the difference in your means, or if it is in a word, normal. The first quiz question measured the students ability to do all of these. It was a "warm-up" question and hopefully served as a reminder of what was taught the week before.

The next question required a slightly different level of thought. The students had to connect the confidence interval and the sample size to the t-test. The table given is not designed specifically for the t-test, which is typically used to test sample sizes larger than 30 at a .05 confidence interval. The students must not only explain what the highlighted number meant, but they had to connect it to the t-test rules. By asking the students what the numbers meant would show whether or not the student understand the rule, and is not just following it because that is what they were taught.

The "group work" part of the assessment was the students chance to really show they had a firm understanding of the concept, and if they did not they could talk to their peers; which sometimes can teach what the teacher can not. By being forced to not just give a yes/no answer they had to show understanding of how the tools were used to either confirm or deny a given hypothesis.

ANALYSIS: 
As a whole the class was almost meeting expectations ( a 2 on a scale of 5 or a low C). What hurt the grades the most was not lack of understanding, but rather lack or reading or not answering a question completely. The "students" would answer the first half of a question, which sometimes demonstrated a higher level of understanding than the second half, but leave the second half blank. All six people did this for at least one question. Because of this I relied heavily on how they responded during the group work activity, which is easy for a group of 6 but would be more difficult for a class of 30.

The successful parts of the quiz were defiantly  tied to the discussion part of the quiz. I made it to where every group was different in the reasons why one was better than the other, but each group still re-enforced the idea that a larger sample size and a higher level of confidence would be a more reliable test. I also believe that the the quiz was effetctive in gaging the students understanding, because in grading it is obvious who really understood, who memorized, and who didn't get it at all.

The not so successful parts of my quiz was the questions. People only answered about half the questions, and they were asking questions that I thought were very clear on the paper. The questions were not long, so I believe it was the wording I used that made the questions harder to understand. I did not mean to make the quiz as hard as I think some people thought it was; it wasn't supposed to be cake, but I think for some the quiz was at a higher level of understanding than some were at. I should have reviewed the topic more than I did and done a better job of making sure the instructions were clear.

Overall, I believe the quiz did a good job at assesing understanding, but the questions themselves were confusing to the majority of students. I would do a better job of explaining and reviewing, but I would defiantly keep the group work portion, as it clearly showed who understood at a deeper level and who didn't.