The class was taking a group quiz on Probability. The class was divided into groups of four (one group had 3). In the end, she picked one paper at random from the group too use as the group grade for the test - so they had to make sure that all of them had all their work on their papers. they were allowed to use calculators but asked to show all their work (For some this meant that they showed the addition when calculating the mean). She had a conversation about how much work is enough for the AP exam. The course is very AP exam oriented - she is always teaching them techniques for the test like attempt all questions. "If you answer a question, whatever you put down gives you a greater chance of scoring than a blank answer".
The quiz consisted of 3 questions.
- Review question: Data in integers(100-150) about ninja turtle weights. They had to calculate the mean, variance and standard deviation. everyone knew how to do this, they "showed" their work in varying degrees of clarity. She reassured tham that AP examiners are atrained to look for the correct bits of their answer rather than the wrong bits. "They are asked to give marks for whatever is right rather than cut marks for what is wrong" In the second part, they had to calculate the 5 number summary(Q1, median, Q3, IQR, min, max) and use that to draw a box plot. 3 out of 5 groups drew a nice symmetric box plot with the right numbers but not scaled properly.
- Card-Based Simulation: This question called for them to do a simulation of drawing 3 cards from the same suit in a five-card hand using the calculator. There were multiple parts to this question - including a review of basic information about cards. They had to assign numbers to the cards. Most groups assigned numbers from 1-52, but made an assumption that 1-13 would denote success and the rest failure. Only one group got the idea that they needed to divide the cards into four groups with equal number of cards. However, they used numbers between 00 and 99, thereby showing understanding of the probabilities involved but not simulating the underlying situation.
The rest of the question was to create part of a tree diagram that reflected the solution space that captures the situation of 3 cards from the same suit in a five-card draw. The students have quite a few time management issues and noone actually finished the tree diagram.
- This was the part hich asked them to create an entire tree diagram. But noone got to this bit in the quiz.
- There was a line printed at the top of the quiz in (tiny) 7 point font, saying" If you read this go get a raffle ticket from the sink counter" She had put out only 10 tickets for 19 students. Her goal was two fold -
- Emphasize the importance of reading everything. Part of the struggle for this class of students is language. So Read the fine print and read absolutely everything that is in front of you is a very important exam and life skill that she is teaching.
- The other was to show that since only ten tickets were out there, some students were going to be more luck than others. However, she emphasized that all students had an equal chance of being lucky and they made their own luck by reading everything.
- In the second question, she asked them to name the four suits of cards and the cards themselves because she discovered that enough of them didn't know the basic information about a pack of cards. To a person like me who grew up playing cards every afternoon in my summer vacation, it seemed strange that these children had got to senior year in school without exposure to a deck of cards.
- Towards the end of the class, she spent ten minutes introducing Venn diagrams as a way to think of probability. Jackie divided the class in two groups based on gender and grade level. She said that either you are a male and if you are not a male then you are a female. To which one student piped with a "...unless you are..." - I was amazed at the speed with which she quelled this by a "that is way more information that we need at this point." what was more amazing to me was the fact that no other students said another word and neither was there any side conversation. To me it is another example of how Jackie works to keep the class on task and push distractions out the door before they have even had a chance to make it in.
