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Students at Guan Ai take exams twice a semester, a mock at half-term and a real one at the end of term. While these exams do a decent job of tracking progress of students, they do have their inadequacies. Much of the content on the exams can be mastered by repeating similar questions ad nauseum over a period stretching several weeks prior to the exam. Certainly this is the preferred strategy of many rural teachers and, truth be told, some of our own teachers.

Yet what these exams aren’t testing for are real problem solving skills; that spark of creativity and intelligence that kicks in when a student encounters a problem that is, maybe via a slight twist on what he or she has previously seen, not answerable by activating “autopilot”.

Thus for the past year the teaching coaches at Guan Ai have been creating tests for this very purpose. We hope they will shine some insight as to whether our reforms really are increasing students’ ability to think critically and independently. Below are some examples of the maths and science tests I created for the 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th graders. Click on the images for larger versions.

5th Grade science test

In this test for 5th graders we asked students how we could increase the number of times a pendulum swings per minute. How the angles, the length of string and the weight of the pendulum change in order to achieve this were what we were looking for.

But the more important point comes in the second part of the question, where we ask students how we might design an experiment to test whether our hypotheses were correct. We’ve emphasised experimentation a lot (those of you who read the blog regularly may remember our travails with creating suitable science experiments at the beggining of the year) and what this question was really about was whether they understood the scientific method of controlling of variables in order to isolate causes. To be honest this question could have been answered better by many students, but their knowledge of this powerful way of thinking has come on a lot.

6th Grade mathematics question

This question linked together what they had learnt in maths this year (percentages and their addition) with our local anti-smoking service project, which was carried out in July. I’d like to think that this problem links the aforementioned mechanical skills they have learn with real problems that they’ve investigated and understand. In this way we can reinforce the real-life utility of mathematics.

6th Grade science question

The 6th graders had studied environmental pollution in science this semester and so a question was designed to test them on their knowledge of the subject. Again, the students’ local environment was utilised in this question. There does exist a river/stream locally, and it is very polluted. This question required students to draw on a map of the river things that contribute to that pollution (factories, dumping) and those that help alleviate it (processing plants).

3rd Grade maths question

The 3rd grade question above asks students to order the the buildings at the school by the area they occupy. This requires that they be able to calculate the areas of rectangles and then order them by size. Two of the buildings at Guan Ai are of identical size, and so there is an equality operator within the spaces in the answer. I’m happy to say that most students answered this question well.