Daily Quizzes

As I've been thinking about my Math 097 class in the Fall, I seem to have broken the class into two components:

1. The development of computational proficiency
2. The understanding of mathematical reasoning

On the first point, I believe it is a reasonable task to have the students complete a 5-10 minute daily quiz to emphasize the importance of being able to compute things correctly in a reasonable amount of time. My immediate guess is that giving a student 7-10 seconds to complete a one or two step algebra problem is a perfectly reasonable amount of time to give them. This means that a 5 minute test will be at least 30 problems long. Does that seem reasonable? I think it does.

I would give this quiz at the end of the class so that they can leave when they finish and not have to sit around and wait. Also, doing it at the end of class instead of before a break means that students who compute more slowly do not have their break time penalized.

I can also see how this can also be an instructive tool. For example:

• 85 + 74 = ???
• (80 + 5) + (70 + 4) = ???
• (80 + 70) + (5 + 4) = ???

It should not be hard to imagine doing this for the distributive property of multiplication over addition and for common errors involving fractions.

By giving problems that are suggestively sequential, I can introduce various aspects of arithmetic that will become relevant to their future algebraic manipulations. It could also be used as a starting point for a discussion for the next class period. I'll definitely have to take a closer look at the structure of the textbook to see how effectively such a scheme could be woven into the material.