March 2023 UPDATE: If the dilation games below whet your appetite for challenges based on transformations, check out these Reflection and Rotation games as well. What does dilation feel like? I recently had the opportunity to work with a group of students who were testing activities that treat geometric transformations as functions (what …
Continue Reading ›› For the past month, I've focused this blog on the role that computers can play in assessing students' mathematical knowledge. I've presented three
Web Sketchpad-based examples of assessment with mathematical topics ranging from
isosceles triangles, to the
Pythagorean Theorem, to the
Continue Reading ›› Today there is no lack of outrage directed at the high-stakes standardized testing that has become so prevalent in the U.S. educational system.
A recent opinion piece in
The New York Times examines the backlash against the Common Core and lays the blame not on the standards themselves, but rather …
Continue Reading ›› In my
previous post, I shared
Dan Meyer's analysis of what's wrong with computer-based mathematics assessments. Dan focuses his critique on the Khan Academy's eighth-grade online mathematics course, identifying 74% of its assessment questions as focusing on numerical answers or multiple-choice items. This is …
Continue Reading ›› Several weeks ago,
Dan Meyer described his experience of completing 88 practice sets in Khan Academy's eighth-grade online mathematics course. His goal was to document the types of evidence the Khan Academy asked students to produce of their mathematical understanding. Dan's findings were disappointing: He concludes that 74% of the Khan Academy's eighth-grade questions were either multiple choice or required nothing more …
Continue Reading ››The Web Sketchpad and Math Education Blog