Hi Audrey,

Thanks for your comments! I did this in Geogebra (with the spreadsheet view) after getting the raw percentage data from Powerschool.

My homework collection habits always start off pretty strict – I start the year by collecting every assignment for every class. This helps me identify the strugglers, the ones that write down just answers, and the ones that are clearly writing down the work of others right away. It gives me a chance to have conversations with all of them about their work habits and about what they do/don’t understand.

We are on a block schedule, so that makes it so there isn’t quite so much paperwork to manage every single day. I typically will check three or four key problems to make it manageable, though if a student has everything correct and justified, I’ll typically check other problems too just to provide an opportunity to give feedback if I can. I encourage them to check answers themselves using Geogebra or Wolfram Alpha, and will also show them how to do so early on in the year.

As for test questions that are non-routine, I usually pepper my class activities with questions that require them to do things differently than just following procedures. I train them to solve the problems in the same way as those they haven’t seen before – write down given information, do a bit of brainstorming on paper to see how to connect the given information to what they know. It’s exactly the set of things you mentioned in the comment – use numbers to check calculations, stay organized, write down ANYTHING in case it might nudge them toward a solution. A big thing in preparing for tests is using technology like Geogebra. Often telling them to solve it that way and then work backwards gives them the confidence of knowing the answer, which can be really powerful. The other big thing I tell them is that I will never give them an unsolvable question on a test. I emphasize in most of what I do that knowing the answer is not important – figuring it out is. As fuzzy as that sounds, it has really worked over the past couple of years to give my students the right mindset to succeed in this way.

I appreciate your kind words!

Evan