Wednesday, May 7, 2008

A Tool to Improve Assessment in Math Classrooms in light of vast Computer Applications

A computer program that will take an electronically generated math assignment and create clones with different numbers would be nice. I create different exam versions to prevent cheating, but if there were a computer program that would make this process more efficient (than say Excel), essentially 30 unique assignments could be generated so that students could work together to understand solutions to problems, but they would be responsible for doing all of the steps themselves to get the answers. Working out solutions together is not copying. It is not cheating if the students must use some independent thought to prepare solutions to assignment problems. (Hopefully these last two lines are not contradictory, and that my point is clear.) In addition, just "changing the numbers" avoids unfair assessment practices that assignments including entirely different questions are at risk of.

1 comment:

Mike Zabrocki said...

Something to generate worksheets with different types of problems might exist already.

http://www.mathproblemgenerator.com/

Maybe not exactly what you were looking for, but maybe this is a step in the right direction.

-Mike