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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 4.1 | The items addressed the targeted standards and focused on both understanding and procedures. A few more questions that required students to explain might have been appropriate. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 5.0 | I found this collection a good example of getting at the major work of a grade through what are too often regulated as 'additional' standards. While it may be a limitation of how the tasks have to be entered, I would argue for listing more standards on may of the tasks. In example, the RP thinking needed to accomplish the last task is not insignificant. There was also no mention of 7.NS standards, though the problems covered a range of number types and having students working with the rational numbers.
For the Mathematical Practices, they are listed in some cases but I would like to see more in the supporting materials linking them to what one might expect to see from a student. The lack of problems working on deliberate cultivation of the skills outlined in MP7 and MP8 are of concern to me. Given, however, the tack these 10 problems took with their focus on 7.G and almost total lack of 7.EE, the lack of MP7 and MP8 work isn't completely surprising. Figuring out a way to bring these two MP's into the collection along with some 7.EE work would strengthen an already strong showing. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Karim Ani | ALIGNED | 4.5 | The tasks in the collection were properly aligned to the standards and offered students opportunities to explore finding the areas and volumes of different shapes, with a particular emphasis on circle areas.
However, the tasks in the collection did not adequately address all components of the target standards. With the exception of one task, every task was aligned to either 7.G.B.4 or 7.G.B.6 (or both). Yet while 7.G.B.4 has students calculating both circumference and area, the collection focused almost entirely on the latter. Similarly, 7.G.B.6 asks students to find areas and volumes of objects composed of triangles, quadrilaterals, polygons, cubes, and right prisms. Though there were some tasks that addressed volume (e.g. the tennis ball cans) and area of non-circular shapes (e.g. the shed), the collection focused mostly on circle areas. This collection is likely to reveal much about students' understanding of this particular topic, but more needs to be done to address the missing components of the listed standards. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 2.4 | This collection attempts to attend to precision with mathematics but misses the mark when attending to precision with appropriate language. Students are not provided with opportunities to choose and use tools strategically; however, this SMP is chosen as a standard. There is minimal opportunity to construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others. Opportunities missed. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 4.1 | The standards targeted within this set or explored deeply and thoroughly in this collection. The collection places specific geometry standards at the center of developing the work of the grade, and connects this work heavily to modeling, reasoning quantitatively, seeing structures, as well as persevering in problem solving. Given the focus of the set, major aspects of the work of the grade is left untreated in this collection. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 5.0 | The progression of ideas in this collection was delightful to watch unfold. I have to admit to being a bit dubious as to were the problems were going with the first few, but thinking of those in light of the mandate to assess a "full range of student understanding" they are well placed. I also enjoyed the progression from simple 2D into 3D thinking with the strong fundamental work sticking in the RP range much of the time. The missing piece I'd like to see is questions having students writing equations with variables as that is so important heading into algebra. While there is good work here with expressions and working with geometry formulas, those are not quite the same as a new situation and having to write an equation with an x. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 3.8 | Collection supported a wide range of understanding beginning with items below the standards selected. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 3.9 | The focus on geometry and geometric shapes offers excellent coherence with the work in geometry done in k-5 - and the work with rational numbers throughout the collections bring the work on rational numbers beginning in 3rd grade to life in a measured way. Given the narrow scope of standards developed in the collection it narrows the strength of coherence with work in the coordinate plane, expressions and equations, and statistics and probability underdeveloped. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Karim Ani | COHERENT | 4.4 | The collection progressed nicely and did a good job of transition from low to relatively high difficulty. This was especially true of the first half of the collection, which explored the mathematics of building a table from the relatively simple (calculating the area of the table top) to the more complex (calculating the areas of shapes within the table design).
Narratively, though, there was a jarring break in the middle when the collection shifted from exploring carpentry to exploring tennis ball cans, then invoicing, and then back to construction again. Not only did this muddy the storyline, but it also resulted in the mathematics feeling less motivated. For instance, I found myself asking of the tennis ball can activity, "Why do I suddenly care about volume?" (and can see a student wondering the same); the conceptual development from areas (2D) to volume (3D) was unclear. Similarly, the transition to scale drawings seemed abrupt and disconnected from either the narrative or mathematical flow of the collection, and it's difficult to know how the collection as a whole fits in the progression from Grade 6 to Grade 8.
Fortunately, the collection includes the seeds of what could be a very powerful experience for students. I would encourage the author to consider ways to maintain a single narrative throughout the entire collection, for instance from transitioning from a table top (2D) to a trunk (3D), and even a scale drawing of the trunk in a catalogue. If the collection revolves around a single story, I |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 2.7 | This collection is does have a nice range of items; however, they are primarily focused in geometry and student's are not asked to make connections. Several opportunities missed to require students to provide reasoning or compare. Too many questions focused around the same context. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 4.1 | The items within the collection offer a unique perspective and even build knowledge around carpentry related mathematics. The items vary in complexity and often develop complexity through the context, discipline specific vocabulary or context, and presentation of content in images. Student output while varied is often driven by calculations and underdevelops the key conceptual understanding behind the calculations being performed. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Karim Ani | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | The majority of the tasks in the collection revolved around an interesting topic: furniture making. Unfortunately, the questions themselves seemed disproportionally procedural: having students calculate the area of a table top, then calculate the area of circles, then calculate the volume of tennis ball cans, etc. As a result, what could have been an authentic exploration of a real-world topic quickly became a series of textbook word problems. Though the collection did offer certain interesting insights such as how carpenters generate circles, the context itself seemed almost secondary, as though carpentry exists solely as fodder for word problems in math class. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | Too many questions focused on the same context. Not engaging for 7th graders. Building a storage shed was not well thought through, even the support indicates this. Extensions were a nice additions. Students need opportunities to make connections with the mathematics and across domains. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 4.2 | Tasks required the students to apply their understanding and use skills. Problems were complex. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 5.0 | I appreciated the contexts for these tasks. I didn't feel like they were stretching "real-world" and they provided strong visuals along with the opportunities for making rough models on paper. Problem 6, child's play, I think is my favorite of the bunch due to the structure work there and how many interesting conversations could come from such a problem. For me to push this all the way to a 5, I would have needed to see a task that dealt with MP4 directly. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 5.0 | The teaching notes for misconceptions were appreciated. I think they could be fleshed out more in some areas, but that's a hard line of giving enough information to help a teacher vs giving so much text that it's overwhelming. Having some ideas for teachers who are working with stumped students would be a good addition, especially if those ideas call back to earlier grades. In example, 2 has a note in the student materials that this "may help students learn about the units in area". By the CCSS, students have been working on the ideas of area since grade 3. In grade 5 students work out area of rectangles with fractional side lengths (5.NF.4b). A callback to such work would help teachers see connections between the grade 7 work and prior experiences their students would have had. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.5 | Supports were much stronger and robust than the items themselves - however, attending to precision as you guide teachers is incredibly important |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Karim Ani | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.4 | The author did a good job of providing a comprehensive explanation of how to do each problem, including likely student errors. The emphasis, though, was mostly on procedures, for instance students not correctly applying the formula for the area of a circle. While this is valuable and helpful information for a teacher to have, many teachers -- and especially novice teachers -- are likely to need support not just in how to *do* the problem but also in how to *teach* it. The supporting materials are helpful content-wise, but the author might consider additional ways to support teachers pedagogically as well. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.0 | The supporting documents provide clear, helpful, and skillfully presented solutions pathways, lists of possible misconceptions, and what the item reveals about student thinking. The supporting documents are highly useful for using these items in the classroom. |
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| Nancy Powell | 79.4 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.9 | Well written and precise supporting materials included answers, misconceptions, extensions and suggestions. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Karim Ani | ALIGNED | 3.3 | The questions in the collection largely emphasized procedural fluency rather than conceptual understanding. While the tasks were correctly aligned to the target standards, the questions themselves did not provide students with sufficient opportunities to engage in meaningful mathematical practices beyond, say, calculating a percent change or writing an algebraic expression. Fortunately, there were moments of true instructional promise, such as those questions in which students had to choose between a variety of possible correct answers and, importantly, justify their reasoning. These questions were well aligned to the Common Core Mathematical Practices and provided a valuable counter-balance to the emphasis on procedures. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 5.0 | There was careful documentation of alignment to the standards, including connections to the standards of mathematical practice. I was impressed by the open response questions and their ability to elicit a different sort of reasoning, one that was in line with mathematical practices. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 2.6 | Tasks are connected to targeted standards and explanations help to make this evident. One exception is "Alex's Cookie Recipe" in which students are asked to set up and solve a proportion. This method of analyzing proportional relationships is not tightly aligned to the expectations of the standards. Also, the practices targeted in the supporting materials sometimes make claim to more SMPs than are addressed in the task. For example, in "check out my DIY,"evidence of students capacity to communicate with precise mathematical language is not clear. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 4.5 | Except a few items that are inaccurately tagged, the majority of tasks are well-aligned to the referenced content- and mathematical practice standards. All items activate at least 2-3 MP standards. MP1, MP2, MP3, MP4, and MP6 standards are well addressed in the set, but MP5, MP7 and MP8 are lacking. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 3.6 | Good breadth of standards and input types. Appreciated the "invent your own problem" input type which appeared several times. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 3.3 | The rubrics provided were helpful in explaining how the tasks were to be assessed. It was unclear to me how 6th Grade thinking would be captured by many of the tasks -- it's clear to me that the thinking would be *incorrect* without a 7th Grade thinking, but unclear to me how we would know if students are using 6th Grade thinking. (As opposed to 2nd Grade, 1st Grade or no thinking.) |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 3.6 | Supporting materials make the scope of the standards before and after the target very explicit. That said, the tasks in every case do not provide opportunities for students to demonstrate where they are on this progression of understanding. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Karim Ani | COHERENT | 2.6 | The collection was composed of tasks that had little to no connection to one another: A task in which students used percents/proportions to explore dog walking fees was immediately followed by one in which they calculated the change in elevation between two cities. Not only were the contexts themselves unrelated, but so were the mathematical concepts therein: percents to integers. Thus, the collection lacked coherence and was unlikely to provide insights into how well students understand a certain mathematical progression. For future versions, I would recommend choosing a given scenario -- e.g. cooking -- an using it as an entry point to develop the thread of a concept, e.g. from unit rates to proportional reasoning. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 2.5 | Many of the problems assessed the same level of proportional understanding. The calculation of a proportion or unit rate. The tasks could have been improved by asking S's for less procedural understanding of proportions. For instance, it would have been helpful to see more questions re the _comparison_ of proportions rather than just their calculation. "Would this make for stronger juice?" for instance, regarding two given ratios of concentrate to water. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 4.8 | Most items in the collection show a unifying thread (proportional reasoning and linear equations) and interconnected ideas. A couple of items (though nice tasks on their own) seem less in synch with the rest. Within each item, attention to conceptual progression and scaffolding is apparnet. The sequencing of concepts within the set could be improved to make conceptual progressions across items more apparent. Vertical alignments to below- & above-grade-level standards are considered and noted. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 4.6 | The tasks were lovely, lively and interesting. There was a clear and successful attempt to connect the problems to real-world scenarios. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 4.6 | Collection shows a great variety of tasks that attend to conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and real-world applications. Most tasks are engaging, challenging, creatively framed, and demand a good dose of reasoning and sense-making. Well done! Adding an item or two that demand more complex modeling (i.e. requiring students to make assumptions, etc.) would further enhance the set. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Karim Ani | RIGOROUS | 2.6 | While the activities involved contexts such as cooking that could potentially be interesting to students, the questions themselves were almost entirely procedural: calculating percents, writing algebraic expressions, etc. As a result, the contexts felt forced and unmotivated, as though milkshakes existed solely as a prism for plotting coordinates. While the contexts hold promise for engaging activities, as currently written they feel like traditional textbook word problems. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 2.3 | This is the first collection that I thought was balance too heavily on application problems, many of which repeated the same recipes context. In some instances, the context was so tricky to decipher that I felt I was being assessed as much on context knowledge as math. (eg. the border around the table cloth; the second half of item #1). |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | Tasks are appealing and provide skill and real life application, but there is less of a range of complexity to the tasks that have potential to elicit evidence of conceptual understanding. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.0 | Excellent teacher support materials – interpretations & rubrics & scoring guides. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.0 | The Supporting materials were very robust and were especially helpful in informing instruction.. The explanation commentary is very detailed and the common issues notes are well done and detailed. That said, there are also claims in the alignment materials that are not precise (including practice standards that are not addressed in the task for example). |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.1 | I liked the instructional supports a lot. They were clearly detailed and carefully written. Many of the problems clued teachers off to a common issue of "students not reading the problem carefully." This doesn't strike me as specific enough of a misconception, and it would be more helpful to have misconceptions and issues tied to the particular problems and content that are under discussion. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 5.0 | Overall, excellent supporting materials -with careful attention to student thinking, potential misunderstandings, and ways to address misconceptions- are offered. Alignments to MP standards, scoring rubrics, and overall explanations are well written and helpful. Feedback to incorrect student response are generally helpful but could be more consistently so (some simply offer the answer or provide steps to solve). Adding Depth of Knowledge information would further help instructors. |
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| Susan Jarvis | 73.4 | Karim Ani | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.4 | The author provided very good supporting materials for teachers, including explanations of the answer, ways to address likely student misconceptions, and a scoring rubric. This was excellent and clearly demonstrates a deep familiarity not only with the concepts but also effective teaching. My main critique is simply that the text-only approach to teacher support is inherently limited and can at times be difficult to follow. For instance, in the explanation of the sea level difference problem, the author suggested using a number line. This is a good suggestion, but a novice teacher may still need more assistance 1) visualizing how to lay out the number line, and 2) how best to talk about it in a way that helps students understand the underlying concept. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 2.4 | Some standards were not precisely aligned and the mathematical practices were weak. There was a lack of attention to understanding. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 4.4 | For Road Trip there are multiple strategies would have like to have seen students have the opportunity to demonstrate their strategy. Simplifying expressions falls short. Last one should not be drag and drop. Charity Run would like to see "approximately" continued to be used - for precision. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 4.3 | This is a fantastic collection of questions with clear alignment to the content and practice standards. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 4.8 | Lovely set of problems. The freedom of multiple approaches to solving the problems is excellent as that provides good deep insight on student thinking for the educator. Matters could be aligned a bit further if there were more elements of working with rational/decimal coefficients in some equations. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 3.5 | The collection develops aspects of operations with rational numbers, scale factors, unit rates, expression and equations as well as geometry (only statistics and probability is not developed) and as a result offers a broad look at the work of 7th grade. The strongest examples of working with the mathematical practices are those where students need to construct explanations and defend positions with mathematical argument (as in 1 and 6 among others) and reasoning quantitatively (as in items 1 and 2). The strength of item 1 in analyzing a cluster in depth is not maintained throughout the collection, and weaken the over robustness with which the content and practice standards are developed. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 1.8 | Assessment was limited to the selected standards. The topics were scattered. Assessments were mostly addressing procedural knowledge. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | David Wees | COHERENT | 4.0 | Every task offers multiple pathways to the final solution and elicits information about how students approached the problems. This allows for a wide range of students to attempt these problems. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 4.2 | Nice connections variety and levels of entry. This set worked well together with the exception of scale drawing, which was lacking. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 4.5 | The freedom of approaching problems multiple ways and giving the opportunity for students to do so is wonderful here. This is a great opportunity for educators to garner good insight into student thinking. Although the problems are disconnected, they are fresh and innovative and interesting and I felt compelled to want to keep reading. Because of that, there is a sense of "flow" to the set. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 2.7 | The items offer a range of difficulty with many being very approachable and offering clear progression from early grades as in items 2, 5, and 9. The collection assesses percent conceptually and procedurally, but unit rate as proportional relationships are developed primarily in context and procedurally rather than conceptually. Items 9 and 10 directly assess assess unit conversion and operations with expressions solely rather than connecting it to previous work or other working within the grade. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | The collection as a whole offer more traditional contexts through which to apply content and, while rigorous at times, the items are often scaffolded or do not require students to engage in problem-solving that requires little inferences, assumptions, or multi-step sequencing of approach. Items like 3 and 7 provide unique opportunities for students to create relationships and test them among a limited set of numbers and offer a structured problem experience that allows for a measured perseverance. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | The rigor of these tasks varied but almost all of them seem very appropriate to the work that will push 7th grade students. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | While real world problems were often presented, few were stimulating and a focus on understanding was weak. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 4.9 | Nice attentiveness to student reasoning - unique items to appeal to 7th graders. On sticky note - a note that the associated picture is not the described situation may be needed for clarity. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 5.0 | Really deep and clever problems. Not only are students offered opportunities to provide solutions in any path they choose, they are also invited to reflect on the questions and make up their own questions. Perfect. A few little wording and math issues here and there:
Activity 1: Better to word "Use the 20% coupon to get a discounted price and then use the 10% coupon to ..."
Activity 8: Option B is really an inequality
Activity 10: Best to eschew the word "simplify" just as the Common Core does. Just ask students to insert equivalent expressions. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.8 | While the instructional guidance for a particular item is often limited, most items have a given reason behind why the item is constructed as it is, possible use case. In addition, each item often broadens instructional approaches by emphasizing the multitude of approaches students could take in tackling the problem. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.6 | The support materials for this collection are fantastic. It's clear that a lot of attention was paid into making them a useful resource for teachers. The one area that could improve these materials is offering suggestions for how to approach specific student misconceptions when they come up. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | Each item had supporting materials but the materials were not precise enough to be helpful for instruction. |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.8 | Instructional support is insightful and helpful, without being labored. Good job! |
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| Kent Haines | 73.3 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.1 | Your attentiveness to formative assessment using commentary and scoring rubrics is strong with almost every problem. Would like to see more of this. Also, continue asking students to share their reasoning or make connections to provide teachers with additional insight into student's understanding. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 4.2 | This collection of items has a nice balance of standards. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 3.8 | The collection develops many of the key concepts within 7th grade (the concept of proportionality is noticeably absent and undeveloped) and does so with a keen eye for the practices, most notably using tools strategically (Item 5 and 7), seeing structure (across items 1, 2, and 9), and constructing viable arguments (items 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, and 10). While the items do, at times, call for skill and procedural development the items target understanding more heavily. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 4.3 | The problems are clearly aligned to the standards and offer a range of opportunities for students to demonstrate different ways they may understand the mathematics. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 4.1 | The practices are frequently and effectively woven into tasks: students use knowledge of rational numbers while attending to precision, apply understanding of the distributive property and structure of expressions to critique arguments and make their own, persevere in solving multi-step problems, and make use of repeated reasoning & structure to connect arithmetic problems to algebraic ones. Some of the problems felt better aimed at 6th grade standards -- for example the emphases on like terms and the distributive property tended not to make use of rational coefficients, students didn't have to fluently work with positive or negative fractions very much. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 3.0 | The items were clearly aligned to the 7th grade standards but did not address both understanding and procedure (4, 5, 6, 9) and lacked attention to the mathematical practices. For example, an item 2 question might be, Explain in words what 1.05 represents in this problem. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 3.7 | The collection as a whole hit many 7th grade standards and had some continuation of topics across problems, allowing teachers to assess, for example, a wider range of understanding of the distributive property. Also, within a single item, there was often a skill from a previous grade level that would allow students to demonstrate whether they'd mastered the skill on a previous level (using the distributive property to do arithmetic; understanding probabilities when rolling 2 dice). Because the collection hit so many standards, there were missed opportunities to assess a single set of tightly related concepts from earlier understandings through previewing future content, and make conceptual connections between, say, adding fractions and the distributive property, or combining like terms and the distributive property. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 3.9 | Opportunities missed for instance Increased percent two ways could have students show how these are the same rather than just keeping them apart. Making explicit connections - |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 4.0 | The collection presents several different looks at coherence. Items 1, 2, and 9 reward the student who is more skilled in working with expressions as developed within the 7th grade, but they serve as items that are also accessible to and draw upon work in numeracy in early grades. Item 5 incorporates a measurement skill developed in k-5 as a central part of the problem and Item 6 by virtue of representing the possibilities of two dice and offering a brief explanation of how to count occurrences allows students to apply the ratio reasoning of 6th grade within the 7th grade concept of probability. The items vary in complexity primarily by altering the interaction types through which students are assessed and how students show what they know. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | David Wees | COHERENT | 4.3 | The questions are well designed to surface student ideas across a wide variety of mathematical concepts. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 2.5 | Several of the topics did not complement each other but could have been if additional questions had been added. Isolated items were 5,6,7,9,and 10. Several of these could have been complementary to the EE standards. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 4.3 | The tasks off a diverse set of experiences that sometimes invite explanation and justification by virtue of the curiosity or tension many of the problems present as in 1, 2, 3, 7, 9, and 10. The introduction of measurement or use of a given diagram creates a different level of engagement with the item - the item becomes something to interact with physically. The collection as a whole does not allow for a simple algorithm or basic formulas; however, the problems also do not consistently require a series of multi-steps or series of judgments in order to reach a solution. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 2.9 | A few of the questions could use more extension so that more successful students can be pushed. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 3.7 | The content wasn't particularly new or original in terms of new contexts or new ways of thinking about the math in context, but was well executed; for example the problem drawn from the standards about the price of a jacket being 1.05*$20 or 1*$20 + 0.05*$20 was well executed, and the contextualized example of the distributive property made sense and didn't fall into the variables-as-labels trap. The content also felt like it was mostly at the same level of complexity, overall. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | While several of the items were creative and engaging others appeared mundane. For example, item 9 had 2 questions that were similar and items, 4, 6 and 9 could have been more rigorous with extensions and connections to other standards. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 4.1 | While there were many missed opportunities to probe for student understanding and connecting of concepts, I really liked this collection of items - with the exception of map distance. I wanted to know why I would need to know this. And Detour triangle - there needs to be more to this. This is not the intent of the standard. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | While there is some commentary provided from which teachers can glean some direction for instruction based on student response there needs to be more support. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.9 | There were suggestions to modify for classroom use, and to support teachers to understand the progression from arithmetic to algebra, and identify common errors. Because most of the tasks were open ended there was less opportunity for students to get instant feedback based on their thinking, and when there was that opportunity sometimes correct answers weren't accepted by the software (Double Scale) or no feedback based on common errors was offered. In Saving Up, the students were asked to write an inequality but then weren't asked to answer how many hours should be worked as an inequality. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.1 | These problems are incredibly instructive. My only caveat is that I was hoping the commentary could include some of the common ways students might approach these problems to support teachers who are unfamiliar with making sense of student work. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.7 | The commentaries addressed basic information but felt lacking. Additional important information was missing as in question 3 where the idea of domain should be discussed. |
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| Jason Dyer | 71.1 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.0 | Although much of the commentary is sparse on each of the items they are very informative. Item 8 is a fairly traditional problem on face value, but the instructional notes offer a great instructional implementation insight (have students select the item and personalize the item by student) as well as suggests one specific possible student error to watch for upon use. Item 4, similarly, offers an extension to increase the longevity of the item and provide a creative use of the item. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 4.1 | All of the questions targeted 7th grade standards (specifically, those around ratio and proportion). Students could use multiple methods to come to a conclusion for many problems, so that their understanding, rather than a single procedure, was being tested. On the other hand, precision was required and attention was paid in the feedback to efficiency, so students' skills were also put to the test. Practices such as justifying and critiquing arguments, attending to precision, and sense-making were woven in. In a few cases the items needed to be clearer to make sure students understood the question being asked. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 4.0 | The tasks are aligned to both the content standards and there is evidence of the MPs throughout the tasks. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 3.2 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 3.3 | The items in this collection certainly relate to the 7th grade Standards and several (not all) of the questions expect for students to justify their reasoning/thinking (part of the mathematical practices). However, the collection could have been strengthened by broadening the scope of the Standards that leveraged over the collection of items. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 3.6 | There are good ideas presented here getting at the task of understanding the multiple manifestations of proportionality. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 3.0 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | April Strom | COHERENT | 3.3 | The items provide a progression of ideas, but it is not clear of what the conceptual nature is of the items. The collection could be strengthened by making the conceptual progression more evident through the individual items and broadening the scope of the items to assess student thinking. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 4.1 | Tasks provide multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate a full range of understanding. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 4.3 | The content progressed from problems students could solve using 6th grade ratio and proportional reasoning to problems that previewed advanced understanding of ideas like percent error. There were problems students could solve using a variety of less formal to more formal methods (and support from the teacher to recognize and work with those students). If students struggle with percent calculations, a teacher might need a little more support with items that identify a below-grade level understanding of percents; an easy tweak would be to include a calculation of 4% of the school enrollment in item 8. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 3.2 | This is tad difficult to judge as there are some overt mathematical problems with some of the latter activities. The first set of activities have some innovation and good ideas for addressing this. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 3.1 | The collection of items is interesting and many of the items are creative. The real-life applications are realistic for the students. The collection of items could be strengthened by providing a broader variation of levels of complexity of items within the collection. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 3.5 | As I mentioned, some good creative ideas here for the development of great materials. But I had some problems:
Activity 1: This question feels like a forced math problem as the true answer is to just look at the label (unit price) on the grocery shelf and don't do any work. Then there are factors that maybe we don't need 8 boxes of juice, or the cash in our wallet is limited, and so on. Attending to these sorts of issues could make it a great problem.
Activity 4: Wording. Say "each ticket" instead of "all tickets". "All tickets the same price as one ticket" is incorrect.
Activity 7: What does "proportional rate of speed" mean? Constant speed? How on earth can we fill out a table for K? The answer to the final question is: "Because this i what the question statement said." Something didn't get uploaded for this question? It is currently very troubled.
Activity 8: The increase from year to year is approximately 4%. So then there is no clear idea on how you are meant to handle rounding. One can get different final answers with the two schemes depending on how you decide to round (as you go along, or not at all until the end, and other ways). The question lucks out that both schemes can't happen to give the same final answer with different choices of rounding along this way.
But this philosophical error in the question could make for a great exploration/question for students.
Activity 10: What is the definition of percentage error? Relative to actual amount or relative to the incorrect amount? I would way it is the opposite of that this question presumes. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 4.0 | The tasks were usually well-suited for the mathematics involved, with realistic concepts that supported, rather than distracted from, the math. While there were no true modeling problems in the collection, the contexts were high quality. The Cross Country Runners and Homework Time problems stretched believability of the context, but contexts like Grocery Shopping and Not Enough Flour made a lot of sense to me. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 4.2 | This is a strength of the collection of tasks. They are interesting and assess conceptual understanding, fluency and how students use their knowledge and apply it to real-life scenarios. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.2 | The collection of items could be strengthened by attending to the common student misconceptions that often arise. For example, in question #1, the item calls for dragging and dropping the correct card to answer the task. However, it's possible that the student guessed at the item and got lucky by answering it correctly. To mitigate this issue, a box could be added to allow the student to explain their thinking. For question 5.2, students are asked to select the constant of proportionality, yet the options provided do not leverage students misconceptions of rate of change (namely, that many students think that rate of change is the change of the inputs divided by the change in the outputs). These details should be included in the items and in the distractors provided. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.0 | The feedback is informative to students and the supporting materials clearly support teachers understanding of the task. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.0 | Overall, there was a LOT of attention paid to student conceptions and misconceptions, and support was often provided to students in the form of hints rather than giving answers. However, there were several places in the teacher support where the math was not quite accurate (the answer to which juice to buy in Grocery Shopping seemed to be incorrect; it was implied that constants of proportionality always have to be dollars per 1 unit and never amount per dollar; the formula for calculating percent error was inconsistent). |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.2 | A lot of appropriate attention was given to this. |
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| Jessica Finley | 70.5 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.7 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Karim Ani | ALIGNED | 4.7 | The collection included a range of question types, from closed-ended/procedural questions to more open-ended ones in which students discussed reasonableness and critiqued reasoning. This was very good, and the collection as a whole provides students with an opportunity to explore proportionality from multiple angles and levels of difficulty. My main critique is that some of the questions were too leading and preempted what could have been important "aha" moments. For example, in the "Dakota Makes a Graph" activity, the question explicitly tells students that a linear model would not be appropriate. Had the question instead asked, "Do you think Taylor's suggestion is a good one?", it would have provided for an even richer thought process. Similarly, in "Dakota's Unit Rate," simplifying the question in Part B re: 207 students would make the activity richer and provide more insight into students' thinking. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 3.9 | You were very, very diligent and careful in explaining how the mathematical practices connect to each task. This was unusual for the items that I judged. Nice work! I didn't find all of the math practices claims completely convincing. For example, I think Bubbles/Punch aren't really engaging in mathematical modeling. (I think it's hard to really engage with eliciting modeling when using multiple choice responses.) |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 4.4 | Excellent overarching support materials. Clear overall picture of the items as they relate to content and practice standards. A mix of items both aimed at procedural understanding as well as larger conceptual themes. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 3.1 | Connection to the target content standard for each question was clear and is made more explicit by the collection summary in the extra materials. Collection could be made stronger with tasks that ask students to reason more around structure (SMP 7) and the demands of modeling beyond applying to a context (SMP 4; for example, determining important variables, verifying the validity of a model, etc). While the tasks do target the critical standards within the grade level, the collection might be strengthened by including tasks that assess students synthesis of these RP standards with others in the grade level (for example, similarity in the geometry standards). |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 3.5 | The collection shows careful attention to intended content standards (though a couple of items are incorrectly tagged / misaligned). All items are also tied to one or more mathematical practice standards. Except for MP5, all standards are addressed at least once, but not always fully or effectively. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 3.0 | Task collection includes tasks that explicitly assess 6th grade ratio standards, but do not provide opportunities for students to engage in reasoning beyond 7th grade expectations. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 3.3 | The collection shows a unifying theme and some conceptual progressions. Even though the set is meant to lay the foundation for 7th grade proportional reasoning work, the range of concepts is narrower than it could've been (most items hit 7.RP.A.2). A number of problems are unclearly written or contain errors, which also compromise coherence. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 3.6 | It's hard to assess student understanding at a wide range without fairly open responses. Some of your tasks include opportunities for kids to explain themselves in words, but most of the tasks come down to numerical or multiple choice answers. It's hard to determine a level of a student's understanding from just those sorts of responses. This is hard, and you nail it in a few tasks (e.g. Dakota's Unit Rate, Dakota Makes a Graph). |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Karim Ani | COHERENT | 4.4 | Using a single context -- a school fundraiser -- really helped to ground the collection and the math in it; questions felt motivated, and the coherence of the narrative ensured that questions didn't feel entirely out of left field. That said, while for the most part the storyline developed gracefully, there were some conceptual breaks. The progression from the initial ratio (Activity 1) to the plotted points (Activity 2) worked well, but the expression-writing in Activity 3 felt premature. Also, Activity 5 explored whether other scenarios were proportional, but the concept of proportionality had not yet been formally established. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 2.5 | Generally high quality. The scoring guide for Dakota's Unit Rate reveals misunderstanding about unit rate, though. eg. Dividing x/y or y/x yields a unit rate; "207 can be represented on a proportional relationship" may lead to the misunderstanding that proportional relationships require integer values for both independent & dependent variables when that's only true for /this/ relationship.
There wasn't an adequate scoring guide for the first section of Where Else Can We Find Proportions? |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 4.7 | Well done. Applications felt uncontrived. Useful applications of unit rates and proportions. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 2.2 | The task collection is well designed in that the context provides a back drop for the student reasoning. And while the supporting materials do provide some error analysis, the tasks provide more evidence of student skill and application than of conceptual understanding. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Karim Ani | RIGOROUS | 4.6 | The author does a good job of tying everything back to a single storyline, and I can see students getting interested in the various aspects of planning a school fundraiser. I also think the author did a very good job of balancing procedural tasks with conceptual ones. I'm not entirely convinced, though, that the activities were "real-world." Even though they involved a real-world context of a school fundraiser, the components still felt somewhat contrived. The explorations of the punch and balloons, for example, seemed straight out of a math textbook, and seemed intended more to elicit a conceptual understanding than to *apply* mathematics to an actual real-world problem. This isn't a critique in and of itself. Rather, it's simply a distinction between conceptual tasks and applications, the former of which made up the bulk of this collection. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 1.7 | Items in the collection, including real-world applications, are quite limited and conventional in type and depth. Few items prompt higher-level reasoning. (Levels of DOK stated in the items' profiles often appear higher than what problems demand.) |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 2.9 | My favorite task was "Taylor is Walking There." Original question, clever use of multiple representations, I loved it. Some of the tasks were repetitive and fairly conventional. I didn't always agree with the premises of a question, though. Is it really true that you *can't* draw a line in "Dakota Makes a Graph"? What if 12 students show up? Couldn't the line a helpful guide for making sense of how many adults should show up? |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.7 | Your supporting materials were great, especially the ones that mapped certain responses to certain possible misconceptions. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Karim Ani | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.0 | Some of the activities do a good job of providing opportunities for students to reveal misconceptions. The "should we graph a line?" question is an obvious example of this, as is the question about 207 students. However, some of the questions were either so mechanical or so front-loaded/scaffolded that it's unclear what a teacher would glean from them. For instance, students are likely to have trouble coming up with expressions that fit the bubble machine context. Unfortunately, the question provides them with pre-made expressions to evaluate rather than asking them to come up with their own. Of course, this may be difficult to do in an online setting, so perhaps the critique is more about the potential for online learning than the authorship itself. Still, I am concerned about what insights a teacher would gain from activities such as "Bubbles" and "Taylor is Walking There," which seem to do much of students' work for them. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.7 | At least half of the problems contain commentaries that don't match solutions or other errors. Feedback to students is uneven; in some problems (mainly in the first half of the set) helpful guidance is given for incorrect answers, but in others it is missing. Supporting materials for teachers are also inconsistent. Helpful suggestions for tackling misconceptions or challenges are present in some items, but not in others. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | Related to my comment about the scoring guide, I'm concerned that some of these items, and the way they're scored, will lead to student misconceptions about rate rather than help teachers diagnose those misconceptions. |
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| Angelika Kavroulakis | 68.7 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.0 | The collection summary and task scoring guides are very robust and provide teachers helpful and important information. This material would definitely help teachers analyze the student work in order to impact instruction. Some of the claims of alignment to the practices in the collection summary are thin, but this is still a very useful resource to provide. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 3.0 | The mathematics covered seems to be at the level of the 7th grade standards, and includes mathematical practices such as attending to precision, critiquing the reasoning of others, and making sense of problems. Questions got at understanding as well as accurate calculations, and support was given to the teacher to consider things like multiple strategies and their efficiency. However, some of the questions and supporting materials are presented so that it is unclear what answer is intended and so that students would struggle to answer the question and demonstrate understanding with the questions asked. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 3.8 | It is hard to judge this suite of problems as some are flawed. They all do or do have the potential of fulfilling alignment well and spawning interesting, enjoyable, non-forced problems. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 4.4 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 4.0 | This collection has a variety of tasks that elicit evidence of the chosen standards and the tasks promote students engaging in the MPs. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 4.2 | The items in this collection are well-aligned to the 7th grade Standards and they make use of several of the mathematical practices via explanation of student thinking. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 3.2 | Tasks will elicit student understanding, however, they will not assess below the selected standards. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 3.2 | These problems represent a good attempt at meeting this criterion. Bit again, the flaws in some problems make this difficult to assess overall. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 4.3 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 2.8 | For some of the items, such as Burgers on the Grill, Carrying Books, or Equation Solving there is clear evidence that multiple strategies are considered and support is given to the teacher to notice, score, give feedback to, and work with students whose understanding is below grade level, and to connect to work that will be done in later grades. However, in some of the items the questions were worded or presented in such a way that the problems couldn't really be answered as written. For example, in Equation Solving, the students should be asked "Find a value of b such that x = 2 makes the equation true.", for 4 sided dice the students should be told what number is written on each side of the dice, for Cinder Block Planter it's unclear what the *interior* vertical surfaces refer to, etc. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | April Strom | COHERENT | 4.3 | These items were indeed coherent and flowed nicely. The initial task of leveraging the proportionality aspect of linearity is refreshing and the collection ended with this same idea as well, but for scatter plots. The collection shows a nice conceptual progression through the standards, ending in an 8th grade content area. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 2.9 | Activity 1: A forced problem.
Activity 2: b = 17 then forces x = 2. The answer is not "undefined."
Activity 3: No one says an equation has to have any values to make it true. An equation is just a sentence so writing x/(-y) + (-x)/y = 0 is totally fine. What this problem means to ask is: "Is the expression x/(-y) + (-x)/y algebraically equivalent to 0?" Is there a fun way to ask that? The next question is asking whether there are any values for x and y that make x/(-y) + (-x)/y = 0 a true statement. The solution is, by the way, all pairs of values with x = 0 and y non-zero. (The latter part missing from the given solution.)
Activity 4: Alas, 33% decrease is not quite the same as 2/3 of the quantity.
Activity 5: There is no meat to what is being asked. All the solution requires is a single word "no" and a single example: a = -1000000000 and b = -1 say.
Activity 6: Wording "The probability of rolling a 5 in the sample ..." Hmm. Part C of the question has no substance as the answer is "Because 9/10 is not 5/8."
Activity 7: The solution, apparently, has to be in the variable with name x. State that in the question.
Activity 8: Are the interior regions square in cross section?
Activity 9: Wording "greatest mural she can get". Perhaps "largest mural she can make." This, overall, is a very confusing and forced question. Who would ever plot scales that way? Why those dots? Any dot we want?
Activity 10: Time of what in the vertical scale? Each plant planted as a seedling? As a seed? From first appearance of a sprout? From first time put in the ground?
Each data point is its own individual data point. What does it mean to ask then "Does each of these one data points follow a proportional relationship?" (I know you want us to find a subset of plants whose collection of data points lie on a common line through the origin, but I don't know what that would mean or do for us in the context of this problem. It's like saying: For the 10 people in this room there are 20 eyes, and there are 4 oranges and 8 bananas in this bowl, and half the letters in my six-letter name are vowels. So this means we have a proportional relationship: If I plot the points (10,20), (4,8), and (3,6) I see a linear fit y = 2x!)
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 3.2 | There are a variety of tasks that balance conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and application. The complexity of the tasks were evident. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 4.7 | The ideas presented in the tasks, such as the proportionality aspect of linearity is indeed rigorous and creative. Most traditional textbooks and curricular materials do not leverage this mathematical connection. The items have a nice balance of conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. It is clear in these items that students need to know how to manipulate symbols, but not just in rote ways, but in very meaningful ways. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 4.3 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 1.9 | Some of the problems involved realistic applications, such as the Cinder Block Planter and Burgers on the Grill, and they represented varying levels of complexity in terms of concepts, skills, and sense-making. However, several of the "real-world problems" were so disconnected from math people actually do in the real-world that knowledge of the actual situation would hamper students' ability to make sense of the problem, particularly the Plant Growth, Scaled Picture, and Ice Cream Costs problems. None of them reflected how people actually use line graphs to display data, and so students are likely to be so confused by the context that they struggle to show mathematical understanding. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.1 | Again, the flaws in a number of these problems make this category hard to judge. There is some good work in this direction in some of the problems. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.6 | There were several time when the supporting materials were unclear enough that I didn't understand the intended answers. Each question had some rationale or description about what would constitute credit or what to pay attention to, which I appreciated, and sometimes there were descriptions of how to support or further work with students who gave particular answers, which is helpful. However, the materials were too often unclear and even seemed to have incorrect mathematics at times. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.7 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.4 | The instructional support provided for each time included a scoring rubric and/or a discussion of the ideas. This supporting material was very informative and necessary to allow teachers to understand the background for each item, as well as thoughts on how to assess the item. The only criticism is that the author could have strengthened the items by leveraging more of the system's capabilities that allow for very dynamic interactions with the user/student for various items. |
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| Jennifer Spencer | 68.2 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.2 | The supporting materials did not clearly address the student misconceptions or give information to teachers how to provide targeted instruction. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 3.9 | This collection represents a very very thorough investigation of the understanding of 7.NS.1 and .3. If a student has the patience to work all the way through this, her teacher will have a superb understanding that student's thinking on these topics. But my score on this is not stellar as feel the jargon and the presentation of these questions could well be a barrier to getting at that understanding - do we need the word "addend" in the first question? (Or are we ascertaining student's knowledge of that term?) I worry a little about the place of the word "best" in two questions - it is loaded. The feel of the questions, I suspect, will present an emotional barrier for students to overcome. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 2.4 | there was limited evidence that students engaged in the mathematical practices. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 3.5 | Tasks aligned closely to the standards and progressions; tasks do address understanding and procedure though I would argue that understanding is different from mathematical practices. There are missed opportunities to use the contextual/application problems to relate student problem-solving to conceptual representations and models of addition and subtraction on the number line. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 2.5 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document.
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 4.3 | The items in this collection were nicely aligned to the 7th grade Standards and the items tackled this issues students have with integers operations. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 3.9 | It certainly does. It is deep probing of a focused standard, and its context within grade 6 and grade 8 work. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 3.5 | The collection focused on understanding addition, subtraction, and magnitude using the number line, and did a nice job including conceptual, procedural, and application assessments. The content mostly stayed on grade level and assessing misconceptions from previous grades, rather than going in-depth into 7th grade topics such as using properties of operations to solve complex addition and subtraction topics with complex numbers (e.g. adding 10 + -3 + -7 by looking for zero pairs, or considering what 2(7 - 3) should be using multiple approaches. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | April Strom | COHERENT | 3.5 | The items reflected the conceptual progressions of the Standards, but also incorporated student misconceptions into the task. This was very nice to see! The author used knowledge of how students think about integer operations to develop items that reveals inconsistencies in thinking. The items within this collection also built upon each other, culminating in the application tasks. However, the collection of items could have been strengthened if the ideas spanned multiple grade levels, thus putting the score for coherence in the 4.0 range. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 3.2 | The tasks addressed both conceptual understanding, application, and procedural fluency and it would have been nice to see a task that combined all three.
Problem #1 does not allow you to submit to receive any feedback. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 2.7 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 3.4 | The task is engaging and it provides opportunity for students to apply their understanding of positive and negative numbers. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 2.9 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 4.0 | The items in this collection are rigorous, given that many of the items require thinking at a deeper level. The balance between conceptual understanding and procedural fluency was good. The Hiking Trip task could have been strengthened by providing an actual place for the hike to occur, particularly with the 2nd part of the item, as some students might question whether it is possible for one to hike on land below sea level. Adding more realism to the item will help students understand that negative numbers do occur in real life. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 3.2 | The tasks are engaging and include both conceptual and procedural assessments. The real-world or application tasks actually require less challenging mathematics and, once the students understand the context and question, can be solved by below-grade level reasoning, which makes them ripe for using as launching tasks (rather than summative assessment of procedural fluency and grade-level conceptual understanding). |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | I worry about the emotional feel of these questions for students. The elevation questions (8 and 10) feel light and joyful. The "run" dice question (9) turns out to be tedious calculation exercise in disguise. Many of the question are assessment like and verge on the rote. And so on. Where's the kid stuff in all this for these 11 year olds? |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.9 | Materials for the teacher are thoughtfully presented and often made suggestions for assessing student weaknesses and targeting misconceptions. Feedback to students is minimal and tells correct answers rather than giving hints. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.8 | On paper there is really nothing to fault with this collection. The author is very talented at homing in on and teasing apart the depths and subtleties of a standard. The challenge now is to couple this with lightness and joy, even if it is being used in an assessment setting.
But to answer the question: In a precise academic context, the instructional support is solid. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.2 | Supporting materials were clear, however, did not address students misconceptions.
Question 9, you can submit the word feet and it marks it correct but "ft" is not correct. I can even enter just numbers and it is correct… I would include ft as a correct choice |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.4 | One strength of this collection is that these items do leverage student conceptions and misconceptions. These ideas are evident through the stems of each item, but also in the well thought out distractors for the multiple choice items. The collection as a whole could have been strengthened by providing more support materials for the items. The author stated several times that the ideas presented in the collection were "simple" but that's not the case for students. It would be beneficial to have more supporting thoughts that more fully articulate the anticipated misconceptions so that teachers could better understand what ideas to emphasize in these items. |
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| Britton Kilpatrick | 65.9 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 4.9 | While "WODB" is an engaging puzzle, it doesn't provide meaningful evidence of students proficiency in the standards targeted. This is, however, the only task that doesn't represent a close alignment to the targeted standards, although the collection would benefit from inclusion of 7.RP. The inclusion of tasks that reference structure of expressions, critiquing reasoning and validating the model in task one ask students to engaging in the practices. The collection would benefit from a modeling scenario rooted in a real world context. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 3.8 | All of the tasks are aligned to both content and targeted mathematical practices. Enjoyed the reasoning tasks. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 3.3 | The items in the collection seem well-aligned to the 7th grade standards, but predominately focused on equivalent expressions. Some other ideas were included, such as area, but the collection could have been strengthened if the items covered a broader range of ideas from 7th grade. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 4.0 | Connection to targeted standards are clear in most standards, although a couple of items are misaligned (i.e. they could be correctly answered without involving the knowledge or skills specified in the referenced standards). Ties to several mathematical practice standards are present in each item but are not explicitly identified, discussed in supporting materials, and not always fully tapped. Many opportunities to address MP3 and MP5 are missed, but other MP standards are generally well integrated. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 1.9 | The majority of the activities dealt only with whole numbers and whole number coefficients when standards asked for work with decimals and rational numbers. The nature of the many problems was below grade level. There were missed opportunities for deep thinking: for example, the final part of activity 4 really should not just be a single multiply choice answer, and the answer would be interesting to explore if x were allowed to be rational. This sort of exploration would get into the standard at hand. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 2.0 | Many of the activities really were below grade-level: they needed to extend to rational numbers as fractions and decimals, too. The majority of questions where whole number focused and weren't quite on target. (For example, the natural way to deal with activity 7 is just to substitute in the proposed answers.) |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 4.8 | Collection provides entry for students to demonstrate understanding along a range of understanding leading to the 7th grade standards expectations. The tasks could be improved with more opportunity for students to demonstrate more formal reasoning beyond that of 7th grade standards. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 3.2 | Some of the collection does address multiple dimensions of the standards and some of the tasks are hit solely above the standard. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 4.2 | Over half of the items do share a common thread and a nice range of conceptual connections (linear equations & expressions). A handful of tasks (though interesting on their own) were out of synch, however. At least one task contains errors in the solutions. Closer attention to scaffolding and sequencing of concepts within and across items would improve coherence. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | April Strom | COHERENT | 2.9 | Since the range of ideas presenting in the collection was limited, it is difficult to glean the conceptual progression from the ideas. The range of ideas presented was narrow. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 2.6 | I see a lot of innovative ideas here that could be taken to the appropriate level. But the graphing in activity 1 really perturbed me - a thinking lass will simply not want to plot the only (severely incorrect) option offered. The premise that we're dealing with a ratio and proportions standard here is wrong, unless the question wants to really dig into what a proportional relationship means and why this one isn't. Activity 2 threw me for a loop. It doesn't go anywhere and is not really addressing a grade 7 standard, or even a grade level concept I don't think. I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt in case it was leading to something surprise, delightful, and on target. But it didn't. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | Collection includes quite a few creative and engaging problems that push higher-level thinking and conceptual understanding, and that offer interesting ways to explore EE standards. It also offers a nice variety in complexity level, but meaningful real-world applications are practically missing from the set. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | Some items are mathematically rigorous, but others (e.g., item 7) are rather traditional-style questions. The mathematical focus of the collection was on procedural fluency, but there were some unique and creative items that leveraged a more conceptual understanding. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 3.6 | Tasks are highly engaging and puzzling (in a good way). Collection could be stronger in including tasks that ask students to reasoning in context of a real life application. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 3.6 | The items are definitely engaging and they address both conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.9 | Supporting materials provide clarity in what misconceptions may be elicited in student thinking. Could be strengthened by including instructional support suggestions based on this evidence. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.6 | The curtness of many of the answers is not helpful (especially the discussion of activity 3 where units are key and are omitted in the presentation). The connection to many of the standards is tenuous in places too, making this criterion not applicable. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.4 | The supporting materials in the collection provided some thoughts for what students would "do" to solve the task, and sometimes the solution key to the item was also included. However, the collection could be strengthened if ideas about student thinking were incorporated in the supporting materials, with attention to the student pitfalls that might occur in that task (or pertaining to the focused mathematical idea). |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.7 | Supporting materials are offered but are uneven. Scoring guides and solution keys are generally quite helpful, but they're not always present. Useful feedback is sometimes offered if students answer incorrectly, but not always. Potential student misconceptions are usually discussed, but not much is offered with regards to how to remedy them. |
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| Mary Bourassa | 64.5 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.1 | The supporting materials provide exemplar instructions for teachers and are presented in a meaningful way. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Karim Ani | ALIGNED | 2.2 | Many of the activities do not match the standards listed. For instance, "Boston Marathon" is intended as a Garde 7 activity. However, students are not introduced to scatterplots until Grade 8. Similarly, "Jon's Job Change" requires students to write linear equations. While these are in the form px + q = r, calcualting a slope and formally writing a linear equation are also Garde 8 standards. Where the activity was consistent with the standard -- e.g. "Credit Card Incentive" -- the questions did not provide students with a sufficient opportunity to demonstrate their mathematical understanding; the open-ended questions were too broad, while the expression/inequality question was so narrow that a teacher would be unlikely to glean much from a student's response. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 3.5 | Most items are appropriately connected to targeted standards but a few are off. A couple of items that address Gr. 8 standards are tagged with Gr. 7 standards. Items sometimes elicit evidence of mastery, but not consistently or systematically. At least one or two mathematical practice standards (esp. reasoning - MP3) are relevant in most problems but are not explicitly identified or discussed (in supporting materials). Except for MP5, most MP standards are activated in the set. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 4.8 | Items addressed the targeted standards. Most items required students to explain their understanding, show their procedural skills and engage in several practices. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 3.3 | The questions seem aligned both to the standards and rigor expected of the Common Core for 7th grade students. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 2.3 | A strength of this collection is that many of the tasks elicit evidence for more than one task at a time, requiring the students to synthesize their thinking. That said, sometimes the claim of which standards are addressed includes some that are not truly addressed in the task (citing 7.RP.A for question 1 is not relevant as the situation is non-proportional, in question two, it is unclear as to what quantities are in the proportional relationship). While items 5 and 7 may reveal student understanding of the concepts at play (namely, rational operations and probabilities of 0 and 1), there is much more reliance on procedural thinking. Perhaps making more elicit connections to the SMPs would strengthen this element. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Karim Ani | COHERENT | 1.9 | The activites were unrelated to one another. Instead of developing a coherent mathematical storyline, the tasks seemed to hop from one topic to another. Even within individual activities, there was not a coherent progression. For instance, the "Credit Card Incentive" activity begins with a comparison of discount options, then suddenly pivots to sales tax. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 4.3 | Items were often crafted to allow students to engage in mathematics below the selected standards and then progress to selected standards but not necessarily above the standards. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | David Wees | COHERENT | 2.9 | Most of the questions would allow for a range of mathematical understandings to be demonstrated but a few of them may be challenging for students to access. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 2.6 | While several of the tasks may provide evidence of student reasoning around ratio, there isn't much opportunity for teachers to be informed as to where students are in the greater progression of reasoning. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 2.2 | The collection hits a range of disparate topics without a unifying thread, so conceptual progression is limited. In a few cases, concepts above grade-levels are presented but not adequately supported or scaffolded (ex. a problem involving Pythagorean Theorem, exponential equations and square root, slope-intercept form, etc.). A number of problems involve problematic / imprecise setups and some solutions contain errors, both of which compromise coherence. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 4.5 | Tasks were both engaging and challenging with different levels of complexity and structure. All items were related to real world situations. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 3.5 | Items in the collection attends nicely to conceptual understanding, procedures, and real-life applications. Interesting application and higher-order thinking problems can be found in throughout, but they are not always set up precisely or accurately (ex. vague language / terminologies used, incorrect assumptions, etc.). 'What do you notice?' questions are effectively used in some cases but not in others (i.e. could've been used in more selective & targeted way). |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 3.6 | Several of the tasks are especially engaging in that the context or frame is unique and real world. At times the language of the task is confusing which distracts from the engagement (for example, the equivalent ratios task is an interesting and puzzling demand, but its isn't clear as to what the question is asking). Each task requires a balance of complexity, but could provide more evidence of conceptual understanding. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 2.9 | The items are focused more on assessing students' conceptual understandings rather than their fluency with mathematical procedures. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Karim Ani | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | Many of the activities involved contexts that could be of legitimate interest to students. These include credit cards, tipping, and soda packaging. However, the questions themselves lacked focus and at times were only tangentially related to the given context. While the seeds of the activities were creative and engaging, the narratives therein often felt overly procedural, closed-ended, or even confusing. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.1 | Supporting materials are inconsistent in quality. Commentaries suggest where misconceptions might occur but not always how to address them or what they suggest about students' thinking (i.e. not fully inform instruction). Because most problems are in constructed-response or short-text format, built-in feedback to students is very limited or unfeasible. In some questions that have precise answers, some hints are offered for incorrect answers, which is helpful. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.9 | Rubrics, answers and supporting instructional ideas were included for almost every question in every item. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.8 | The rubric and scoring guides are helpful and the inclusion of the "what do you notice" question would provide insightful evidence of student thinking to inform instruction. The supporting materials could be strengthened with more precise articulation of the mathematics of each task and an articulation of how the student work could inform targeted instruction. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.1 | Many of the items will be very informative for teachers as they make sense of how students understand the mathematical ideas. |
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| Bryan Anderson | 62.5 | Karim Ani | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.2 | I appreciate the inclusion of a rubric. However, the rubrics were somewhat generic and the explanations of the answers did not address potential student misconceptions or really provide much in the way of teacher support. Many of the questions were very difficult, and as described before even inconsistent with the stated grade level. Given this, teachers would likely need significantly more guidance than the supporting materials provide. To be blunt, it would be extremely difficult for a novice (or even experienced) teacher to use these tasks effectively without additional resources. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 2.8 | Overall alignment of the tasks to the standards was fine. Task 2 did claim alignment with 7.G.B.4, but that standard is specifically for circles which are not included in the task making this alignment inappropriate. There is no mention of 7.NS standards, though several of the tasks could lay claim to attending to standards in that domain. Since a single task can only align to aspects of a standard and not fully asses it, elaboration on what aspect(s) of the cited standards are being addressed by the task would strengthen this collection.
Outside of one reference to MP6 and using precise language in task 4, the mathematical practices are missing entirely. As a teacher I want to know what mathematical habits of mind task authors think students would exhibit while working a task and what I as a teacher should look for to encourage said habits. In example, task #2, enlarging squares, is an opportunity to highly MP3, yet no mention is made other than the phrase "justify" and the sample answer is an unconvincing argument. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 1.1 | The tasks are clearly related to the standards for 7th grade but most of the tasks look like they assess just procedural knowledge (eg. find an answer) rather than conceptual knowledge (why does this solution work?). |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 3.5 | The collection offers a strong development of the ratio and proportion standards within the 7th grade while also maintaining an intentional inclusive of rational numbers. While modeling overtly occurs (items 3 and 7) and constructing explanations or justifications does a occur a few times, the items under-develop the practices . |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 4.2 | Problems presented were focused on ratios and proportional relationship primarily. Set needs to be more intentional about connecting to SMP.There was a nice variety of items; however, opportunities were missed to see student work/reasoning and then have student complete the answer. Some items were wordy or oddly worded. There were also "process" errors that did not allow for the full experience of the items. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 4.3 | Most mathematical practices were interwoven into the collection of items. Understanding and ability to use procedures were embedded in items and the collection. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 3.4 | The opening items (1-3) provides an excellent transition from the work on ratios and proportions in 6th grade to that of 7th. In addition, items 5-7 continue to build and draw heavily on the work in 6th grade where students have ended the fraction progression with division of a fraction by a fraction. These items extend that, but readily build on that as a central part of the item. The item does not cohere will within the grade level as there are little development of probability, statistics, geometery or expressions and equations. The treatment within 7th grade was narrow and did not allow for more conceptual progress to be made across the k-8 spectrum. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 3.1 | This set of items worked well together to demonstrate an understanding of ratio and proportional relationships with opportunities missed to make connections. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 2.1 | If there is a progression in this set it is not readily apparent nor is a conceptual progression discussed in the supporting materials. This collection could be improved by making deliberate connections to material from previous grades and how that understanding fits into 7th and the inclusion of tasks that stretch 7th grade understanding into the realm of 8th grade. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 3.8 | The topics were supporting and complementary but could have been extended to other domains. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | David Wees | COHERENT | 1.8 | Most of the tasks are narrowly focused on one or more grade-level standards, which can have its advantages. One disadvantage though is that students whose understanding falls above or below grade level may not be able to demonstrate their understanding on such a task. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 4.1 | As a collection the tasks involved application procedural skill and fluency. The collection also included several levels of complexity in a task and within tasks. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 1.9 | My favourite problem in the collection is Recycling Returns, which does an excellent job connecting calculating percents with thinking about rate of change/slope. Many of the problems present mathematical ideas in interesting contexts however not all of the tasks are sufficiently complex. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 3.2 | The items offer a diverse set of mathematical and applied contexts, with a real effort to offer contexts that are intriguing and grade appropriate. The tasks do vary in complexity, but the variation in complexity is primarily through choice of numbers rather than the algebraic, multi-step nature, or presentation of the item itself. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 4.1 | Although some items were wordy or oddly worded - and I was unable to experience the item as intended, I like really liked the variety of types of the items. They were all primarily focused on RP or RP related. Could have used more RP with EE connections. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 3.1 | Two of the tasks, 4 and 8, made no attempt at real world contexts. In the supporting materials for #4, the phrase "true mathematical situation" was used as an alternative to real world situations which left me confused as the real world is to me by definition a "true mathematical situation". Perhaps "abstract mathematical situation" would be more apt? I think both of these tasks could benefit by being part 'abstract reasoning' and part 'real world' rather than dwelling completely in the abstract.
Some of the other contexts felt stretched, such as task 5, though I did like the overall format of sorting and then making a justification in that task. I would note that in part B the question, the solution, and the teacher's guide do not match up (is it slowest or fasts? is Zach 1/8 canvas per minute or 1 canvas per 1/8th minute?). Other tasks, such as #6, had an interesting start and end but I'm doubtful that the phrasing in that task would be engaging enough to a student that they would feel a hook to try and figure out the speed in miles/hour. A small change of setting to two students arguing if that's slower or faster than freeway speeds could add a bit more interest and give more reason for the conversion.
Task 9 and 10 were nice context-wise and could be improved by encouraging in the notes for teachers to ensure students understand the situation fully before, in the case of task 9, engaging with the abstraction of the graph. Turning in cans for cash is not a common experience for students across the US with how the laws differ.
Lastly, while I understand the general public reaction to things like saliva, biology is biology and pushing values (such as "yuck") into a natural process has longer term consequences. In the same way I dislike other teachers bemoaning mathematics, I have doubts that biology teachers appreciated similar feelings getting attributed to their field. To note, humans are producing around a half gallon a day. It's an interesting comparison. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.2 | Each item was supported with some instructional ideas. Possible student answers were included. The teacher support was good but could have included other mathematical thinking. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | The teaching notes in this collection are very brief and outside of some minor notes on possible misconceptions in a few cases they do not "inform instruction with justification and precision".
Additionally, I question the recommendations for teacher moves given in some of the additional materials. In example, task 3 notes that if a student uses the value 1470 for the unit rate teachers should "Point out this value does not make sense" instead of encouraging the teacher to have the student explain their thinking and how they calculated 1470 so the teacher can better understand what the student misconception is and where to go next. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.6 | The instructional supports provide clear statements for what misconceptions may be elicited by the item and provide instructional insights into what error students may be making. In addition, while brief, they misconceptions explained are paired with possible approaches to address the misconception or a commentary on the origin of the misconception. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | The supporting materials are very useful for teachers who wish to make use of these tasks. |
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| Kelley Ellenberg | 61.9 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.4 | Good suggestions in teacher notes - I would have like to have seen more of what was suggested in the items themselves - missed opportunities. For instance Proportionality constant. Also, not all of the problems lent themselves to instructional supports. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 2.8 | The problems are aligned. Good job! I wasn't too picky about this, I give an average score unless I see something that really stands out in terms of alignment or non-alignment. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 3.9 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Karim Ani | ALIGNED | 2.9 | The questions in the collection largely emphasized procedural fluency rather than conceptual understanding. While the tasks were correctly aligned to the target standards, the questions themselves did not provide students with sufficient opportunities to engage in meaningful mathematical practices beyond, say, solving a proportion or calculating a unit rate. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 3.1 | I see the degree to which tasks align with the stated standards is mixed. For example, activity 8 is a clever way to get at its standard, but activity 3 is not quite 7.EE.2. But there are deeper problems in places. For example, activity 2 is trying to get at notion of "unit rate". But what does it mean to say "the unit rate in miles per hour"? The notion of unit rate occurs when there is a clear, pre-established context of what the preferred units are. This question doesn't have that and the phrase unit rate really should be deleted from the question statement. The natural question is just to ask "What is its speed in miles per hour?" But then we're not addressing the standard claimed. Subtle issues like this appear throughout. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 4.4 | Lots of opportunities for argumentation. I appreciated items that paired a selected response item with a blank for a free-form argument. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 3.0 | Individual items went relatively deep into a given concept. There was a narrower breadth of concepts covered, however. (eg. Several items covering the same concept.) |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 2.0 | A lot of these questions would either be right/wrong and wouldn't elicit a ton of prior understanding. For example, in Speed of Fly I don't know how we could learn much about how a student is thinking about rates if they get the question wrong. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 3.0 | I didn't get a deep sense of connected "flow" throughout this series of activities. I know that is a very hard thing to achieve, so I feel uncomfortable focusing on that, as there is an overall theme being explored that does connect the activities. All felt adequate, but there wasn't a feeling of overall "journey" for students to enjoy. For the instructor, it felt like we were only attending to the standards in a literal sense, checking off the content of the standards alone. But there was some good opportunity to show their intellectual agility in the open-ended responses. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Karim Ani | COHERENT | 2.6 | The collection was composed of tasks that had little to no connection to one another: A task in which students used proportions to explore a leaking faucet was immediately followed by one in which they calculated the speed of a housefly. Not only were the contexts themselves unrelated, but so were the mathematical concepts therein. Thus, the collection lacked coherence and was unlikely to provide insights into how well students understand a certain mathematical progression. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 4.3 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 2.3 | Some of the tasks really stood out. I loved Coffee and Snacks, because I'd never seen a task like it before. I also liked the Shoes task, because a debate feels like a fresh and underutilized context for a question. The other tasks didn't stand out to me. They felt like problems I had seen before. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | Good tasks, esp w/r/t skill development. My opinion is that the real-world overwhelmed the math on at least two occasions. 1) "Percent markup" on #4 is a topic that may be opaque to students and wasn't elaborated in the task itself. 2) Weddings and other events (#5) don't generally plan for "at least 300" guests, they plan for a hard upper cap, eg. "no more than 300." That contradiction made it harder for me to express myself mathematically. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 2.7 | I struggled with this category.
Activity 1: Nowhere said we must assume the dripping is regular. (In fact, why would one even assume that?) Also, no one, in real life, solves part 2 by doing the approach of part 1. Problem is forced.
Activity 2: Notion of "unit rate" is muddled. Problem also forced.
Activity 3: Wording issues: Might we read it as the cupcakes the same price as the coffee? (One or both?)
Activity 5: Wording problem: So 300 guests at round tables, or 300 total in the room? Why not have half a table? (I've seen round tables that split.)
Activity 7: "negative sign as a separate portion of the final answer" I am not sure what that means. (And makes me think that integer operations are only for positive numbers and then you put back any negative signs later as they are separate.)
Activity 9: "percents cannot be combined unless stated in the problem." I am not sure what it trying to be explained here. It is confusing. The wording thereafter doesn't really help instructor explain why addition of the percentage amounts is not appropriate.
Activity 10: "Calories burned per mile" So what is the data he is actually plotting? |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Karim Ani | RIGOROUS | 2.1 | While the activities involved contexts such as baking that could potentially be interesting to students, the questions themselves were almost entirely procedural: solving proportions, writing algebraic expressions, etc. As a result, the contexts felt forced and unmotivated, as though weddings existed solely as a prism for writing inequalities. While the contexts may hold promise for engaging activities, as currently written they feel like traditional textbook word problems that are unlikely to engage students and may in fact perpetuate the stereotype of math as a random series of meaningless steps. The leaky faucet task is a good example of this, as a student may immediately ask, "How would anyone know how many water drops there were per 90 minutes?" For future versions, instead of trying to force contexts to illustrate mathematical concepts, I would encourage the author to look at situations such as baking or plumbing and ask, "What types of math authentically come up in this situation, and what kinds of questions can I ask to help students explore it?" |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 4.3 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 4.0 | Robust teacher materials. Detailed rubrics. Misconceptions outlined. Really sharp. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Karim Ani | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.3 | The author included a scoring rubric for each question, as well as an explanation for why students might get incorrect answers. However, there was no guidance for how to teach the concepts in a meaningful way or how to help students who are struggling. Unless a teacher already has mastery for how to teach these tasks, the included materials would need to be fleshed out considerably to be valuable, particularly to a novice or otherwise struggling teacher. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.8 | Very good parts presented here, but also much confusion in other parts - chiefly due to wording problems. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.6 | It wasn't clear to me what the discussion points were intended to support. Were they intended as possible points for discussion with students? If so, I think they'd need to be juicier. Often the suggested discussion points were simply pointing out mistakes. The rubric essentially functioned as an answer key. I would've liked to see more developmental approach to the rubric, one that described what beginning, developing and expert work on the problem looked like. |
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| Tanya Allen-Gaines | 60.8 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.7 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 2.7 | The mathematical practices were never mentioned in the supporting materials. The multiple choice nature of much of the collection without expanded notes on what type of mathematical habits of mind one would expect a student to exemplify on specific tasks gives this collection a feel of checking to see if students have memorized specific procedures in a set way. Only #9 gave students room to construct and make a mathematical argument.
Standards were listed for each task, but no deliberate notes were included as to what aspect of the standard is addressed by the task. It is not possible for a single task to fully address a standard so commenting on what asked of the standard is being illuminated by the task is beneficial for teachers. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 3.2 | The collection clearly targeted 7th grade standards -- equivalent expressions involving the distributive property and coefficients drawn from the rational numbers; there were a few opportunities to assess mathematical practices such as MP1, MP2, and sometimes MP3. The tasks are challenging; on the other hand, some aspects feel procedural at the expense of concepts, such as identifying the steps when solving an equation (vs. re-constructing one person's argument or steps); matching vocabulary rather than using the concepts that underly the vocabulary. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 3.6 | The collection of items requires students to think in multiple ways about the mathematics and is highly aligned to the 7th grade standards, specifically for Expressions and Equations, and Ratios and Proportional Relationships. The tasks push student thinking and understanding, along with building procedural fluency. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 3.9 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 3.9 | Excellent task - multiple ways to demonstrated evidence of the standard and students had to demonstrate equivalence |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 2.7 | There is a progression from easier to more challenging problems in the set. Some problems tied together EE and G standards or EE and RP standards, which was good to see.
Many of the problems feel procedural, however, so I do not believe this set would assess "a full range of student understanding"--especially those students able to reason critically at a high level or for those students who thinking in less linear manners. In example, for task #2 part III has a strong implication that the order there is what must be followed to solve an equation and task #5 part 2 and 3 wants students to identify a proportion and then solve it when the CCSS does not have "write a proportion" in any standard for very specific reasons. These tasks could be made stronger by allowing for a wider range of mathematical thinking from students. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 2.7 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 3.6 | These tasks are aligned to the standards and assess students at different levels. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 2.1 | Overall these tasks felt like good 7th grade summative assessments: students who can do them are ready for 8th grade. However, as a teacher I would struggle to use these tasks to understand what my student didn't understand about the 7th grade standards, and what other tools they had to think about this content. I didn't see the connections to earlier stages in the thinking progressions such as operating on number before variables, or working with whole-number coefficients or simpler expressions. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | April Strom | COHERENT | 3.8 | These items provide a coherent connection to prior thinking by building on students' knowledge of expressions, variable, and simplification. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 1.6 | The "real-life" problems felt largely "fake-life" -- contexts that make sense in math books but not in students' actual lives. My favorite of the applied problems were the inequality task, although understanding the context well enough to understand which expression should be the larger expression felt challenging, the pizza value comparison (though that's not an original task), and the modeling of how many times the boys could ride the roller coaster by lunch time -- that one felt worth doing math to solve, original, and on-grade-level. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 3.4 | The tasks definitely has a variety of DOK and bring in contextual problems. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 2.6 | I found the "real world" contexts to be a bit of a stretch on the majority of the problems. The super-theme used throughout, however, is good to see as the benefits for students (particularly ELL students) are high when a single theme is chosen for a collection. I'm wondering if some of the problems could be brought into the "real world math" fold from the "fake world math" fold a bit if perhaps the students had an assignment they were working on as part of the "class trip". Situations such as #5 where the values seemingly came out of the aether instead of the more natural #9 where reading such information off the menu seems completely plausible are an example of what I'm trying to get at. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 3.2 | I feel that the rigor of these items could be strengthened by providing more non-routine tasks for students to complete. Some of the tasks in the collection are rather routine, but the novel part is that the options/distractors for many of the items require students to choose more than just one right answer. This part adds to the rigor, but many tasks are routine. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.2 | Feedback to the students are limited on some of the problems. Feedback should include how to address the misconceptions. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.9 | There were multiple attempts to provide useful feedback to the students based on their misconceptions -- answer choices were thoughtful so that feedback could be thoughtful. The support for the teacher was often minimal -- there was a rationale about the standards assessed but no support for the teacher about what to do if students struggled (or excelled). |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.7 | This collection could benefit greatly from the addition of teacher notes. There is little to no information on student misconceptions or possible next steps based on the results during/after the formative assessment in any of the supporting materials.
As a side note as i'm unsure where to put it, in task 3 I think there is a typo in part b. On my screen it has -21y - 2 + 15y. Judging by which ones are yes/no, I think the -2 term is meant to be -21. |
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| Ann Marie VanSickle | 58.6 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.1 | I feel that the range of choices for many tasks provide evidence that student thinking and misconceptions weighed into the development of the possible answers to each item. However, the wording in some tasks, such as Part I of Equivalent Expressions needs to be made more clear. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 4.2 | Missed opportunities to connect to the SMP - look for structure, generalize, model - Although having the students provide their path to the solution allows teachers to see into the student's reasoning. Attend to precision of language is important. Attend to grammar and wording. Consider using pictures. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 3.3 | Most of the questions are well aligned to the 7th grade standards although a couple of the tasks use ideas from other grade levels. Almost all of the tasks seem weighted towards rates and proportional reasoning. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 2.8 | Some of the items in the collections could be associated with the standards noted if they had been worked in a specific manner. The open-ended approach certainly leads to creativity but often does assess the standards listed. Questions could have been added so the students could address specific standards. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 3.8 | While the alignment on most problems is acceptable, for #4 standard 7.RP.A.2c is listed but this standard specifically states "represent proportional relationships by equations" and the presented solution does not do this nor does the problem promote such a path with its wording. I also question the alignment for #6 as standard 7.RP.A.2a states "decide whether two quantities are in a proportional relationship..." and this question, as the statement "One can assume that this ratio will be the same for the building" in the supporting materials indicates relies on a student knowing the quantities are in a proportional relationship. Lastly for #3 I would consider a broader alignment with 7.RP.A instead of 7.RP.A.1 since I don't think the problem gets at the core of "compute unit rater associated with ratios of fractions...".
Outside of #2, no other support materials directly address the standards for mathematical practice (I am discounting the statement "The solution/answer should create a viable argument and show precision in the calculations" as it lacks specifics for given problems). Understanding a task writers goals for the types of mathematical habits of mind a student would exemplify while solving the task is helpful for teachers as they survey the work of students looking for types of thinking to highlight. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 1.7 | While the items develop individual standards and assess them, it does not address them as a cluster or as representative of bigger grade level ideas. By creating assessments items that focus on eliciting a specific aspect of a standard the practices of problem-solving, modeling, etc. are underdeveloped in this collection. The items do not appear to be designed as vehicles for assessing the mathematical practices. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 3.9 | Provides a range of entry points for each problem and sometimes addresses that in the support material. Context provided allowed students to make connections. Some items not strong - Tall Buildings and there are 2 similar taxi cab problems. Enlarge a picture is oddly worded. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 3.2 | The collection had the potential to address student understanding but due to a lack of specificity in directions several standards might not be addressed. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 2.7 | None of the tasks were listed with links to 7.NS standards and I believe many of the nuances of the number system composed in those standards are important for algebraic thinking heading forwards in the path to algebra. This is not to say that understandings embodies in the 7.NS standards were not present, but rather that they were not listed or addressed in the supporting materials.
With respect to assessing student understanding, I would pin the majority of these problems as ones for a strong student at the end of 7th grade so I am left doubtful that these problems would "assess a full range of student understanding from below to slightly above". Many of these problems do not have a "foothold" for struggling students to gain entry into the problem in a way that allow for some assessment of their understanding. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | David Wees | COHERENT | 3.1 | As a whole the collection does an excellent job of assessing a wide variety of student understanding but some individual problems may not give students sufficient access. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 1.6 | The narrow focus on developing specific phrases or aspects of 7th grade standards, while in sometimes very specific and useful, they do not offer direct or carefully constructed connections to the progression of ideas within the standards. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 2.4 | I found the push for 'real-world' contexts a bit stretched in places and non-purposeful in some others. In example, the 'internet plans' in #7 for home internet felt like a stretch as being charged for internet 'hourly' is not something I have ever encountered outside of the internet cafe's of the 90s. Two problems reuse taxi cab mathematics as a context is similar ways. #6, Tall Buildings, lacks the context needed to be engaging and there appears to be a "part 2" to the problem that is never addressed in the supporting materials. Problem #4, Enlarging a Picture, is similar to tall buildings in that there is a context but it doesn't appear to support the problem other than helping to visualize. The wording of #4 is also confusing as "made 5 times larger" could easily be interpreted as making the area of the original 5 times larger due to the lack of specification as to which value(s) is being scaled by a factor of 5.
I found the slide context in #3 to be interesting and one that could be revisited several times in a class with changes in parameters. Likewise on #5 and #2. I wondering if #2 could benefit from turning it into more of a "would you rather" situation with two types of coupons, but you can only choose to go with one. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 1.7 | Most of the items represent routine or traditional tasks that involve carrying out a simply algorithm or straightforward set of calculations; however, many do illustrate in very short scenarios a broad set of contexts for which 7th grade set of standards is applicable. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 2.9 | Many of the tasks present interesting ideas for students to grapple with. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 3.3 | Tasks were engaging and addressed different levels of application, understanding and skill. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 2.7 | Nice variety of situations (not necessarily original) involving RP. Items applying math to situation but students were not always given a reasoning or purpose for doing the item or making connections. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.5 | Although the instructional support materials were precise they not did not offer enough ideas on strategies or processes students might use. This would have been useful to support instruction. Misconceptions were addressed. Materials were good but not exemplary. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.4 | The support materials are very instructive and useful. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.7 | Nice job providing instructional supports for teachers, at times exemplary. Be precise with language and offer multiple ways for solving. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.7 | I would have liked to have seen more information on possible solutions paths and thoughts on how teachers might consider discussing them in the classroom. There was a focus on arithmetic/algebraic paths and little on the visual paths (tape diagrams, double number lines) outside of mentioning their existence, though I'm unsure if this is due to the nature of the tool or something else.
I would also like to see an expansion on the phrase "Partial credit should be given to students who get parts of the problem correct", which is used in almost every supporting materials text. Are all misconceptions equal? Which ones need to be addressed immediately and which can wait as they will arise naturally in a future context? Thoughts on where a teacher might take next steps if certain misconceptions are seen across many students would also be nice, but possibly beyond the scope of this project.
Little to no advice is given for instruction supports as related to introduction of a problem, student grouping, etc. |
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| Richard Zilm | 58.4 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | The support materials for this calculation mostly focus on providing the correct solutions set or sets that students may present with less emphasis on the misconceptions or interventions that may be taken as a result of viewing student work on the problem |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 3.9 | I appreciated how many items included both a conceptual and procedural connection, asking for a computation and how it was derived, for instance. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 2.4 | There were missed opportunities to get to the intent of the standards and connect to the standards for mathematical practice. This set of problems was somewhat reflective of a traditional grade 7set with few exceptions. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 2.8 | The items were aligned well. I didn't notice anything that really stood out as amazingly aligned or egregiously not-aligned, so I gave an average score. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 3.9 | The collection covers the core concepts within the 7th grade standards from operations with rational numbers to expressions and equations to geometry to ratios and proportions (statistics is the only domain clearly absent from the collection). Items also engage in the modeling practice as in item 1 where students judge whether a particular set of diverse models represent a proportional relationship or as in items 4, 7, 9, and 10 where students are generalizing relationships using equations and inequalities. The attention to structure is also evidence in item 3 and 9 as students look to identify equivalence among expressions rather than only simplifying expressions in a linear fashion. The set underdevelops explanation, justification, verbal reasoning, and criticism of the work of others and as a result there is limited opportunity for students to verbally express or articulate mathematical ideas, relationships, etc. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 3.0 | Alignments listed for tasks are appropriate. For task #4, 7.NS.A.3 is listed while in the supporting materials 7.RP.A.3 is stated -- misprint?
As no single task can fully illustrate a standard, it is up to the task writer to explain what aspect of a standard their task is attempting to address. This collection would be improved by such elaborations along with noting connections to other standards (in ex: ideas from 7.NS appear in many of these tasks but are only referenced in two).
The mathematical practices are never mentioned in any of the supporting materials. As such, users of the task are left not knowing the original intent of the writer for the type of mathematical habits of mind they planned for students to engage in making it more difficult for the teacher to meet the goals of the collection. Examples of the type of thinking and work you want to students to experience would greatly improve this collection. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 1.5 | Although I liked the variety of standards for this collections, the items were a bit all over the place and did not get to measuring student's reasoning and depth of understanding. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 3.3 | The collection represents a series of items that captures much of the major work of the grade and is a wonderful window into the content of the grade (save the absence of the statistics and probability standards). Each item is firmly rooted within the work of the grade and rarely offers scaffolding that builds from previous work (though all items clearly rely on previous work) or offers moments that extend the work beyond itself to grades above it. The collection, to its merit,, is a set of items that clearly aligns to the expectations of the grade, but as a result spans a narrow range below and above the selected Standards. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 3.7 | In order to elicit student thinking that comes above and below a standard, there has to be a certain openness in the response. A few of your tasks had this openness -- Equivalent Expressions, The Ice Cream Problem in particular -- while others could only be responded to narrowly, making it harder to see a range of student thinking. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 2.4 | While I see a range of standards marked, there does not appear to be anything tying the collection together. The use of "super-themes" for sets of problems have shown to have great benefit for all students, but especially those with disabilities and those learning English. The topics here range from food to abstract math to tents to dream catchers and each task brings new math with little to no connection to the previous problem(s) and a new situation that a student will have to spend time adjusting to, which in grade 7 puts a high demand on cognitive load. Content focus' on grade 7 without stated call backs to grade 6 or anything citing looking ahead to grade 8.
Some questions I have about this set I think are caused by an upload problem. In example, "Marcus's Costume" is a problem about carnations instead of costumes and "dreamcatcher problem" never describes what a dreamcatcher is and the questions bring the existence of tissue paper seemingly out of nowhere.
Lastly, in task 2, "ice cream problem", I question the phrase "Find the constant of proportionality (r) for this relationship" as there are two constants of proportionality in any relationship. While I agree that with the way the graph is set up and the ordering of the the values in the sentence that 3 and 'c = 3g' appears to be where things are going, the problem would benefit from allowing 1/3 along with 'g = (1/3)c' as solution. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 3.9 | The collection assesses a broad range of standards and different levels of depth. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | Several interesting real-world application problems. Some problems, like the final problem which attempts to combine algebra & geometry, seemed more contrived. Also: the questions for one problem refer to a dreamcatcher but that's the first reference we see to a dreamcatcher. Up until that point, the shape looked like nothing more than a pie graph. Perhaps include that reference earlier. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 2.2 | Missed opportunities to engage in real-life application. For example Ice Cream provided a opportunity to connect math (graph and vocabulary) to the context. Tent volume - problems like this make seventh graders dislike math. So for $20 more dollars what are you getting? Maria's Dessert could lead to misconception and is a missed opportunity for students to explanation, even if there are limitations with technology. Dream Catcher I was lost on this one. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 3.3 | A few of the tasks were original, challenging and engaging. (I loved Operating on Rational Numbers.) Some tasks nailed the real-world also. Several tasks didn't really stand out to me. "Marcus' Costume" seemed like a familiar word problem to me, one that I had seen before. Overall, nice work here. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 2.8 | I appreciated the tasks with a mix of computation and with room for students to write out their methods. The ordering and the sorting problems were also good use of the digital medium, though the context in #3 felt stretched. I would like to see more tasks focus on student reasoning and making use of MP7 and MP8 instead of just having to use a formula and compare two numbers (#6) or simplify 'naked' expressions (#5). #5 has quite a bit of potential for sorting them in order without doing the calculations, but nothing in the teaching notes indicated that students should be encouraged to approach the problem that way.
To note for revisions, some states either don't allow or strongly discourage the use of brand names (kiss') or using sweets (brownies, ice cream) for classroom examples. I personally shy away from unnecessary food (sweets and desserts) examples due to having working in a school with a high percentage of students living in food insecure homes. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 3.6 | The collection offers a wide variety of items both mathematical and applied and utilizes verbal, graphical, and tabular representations of information as well as pushes both procedural fluency and conceptual understanding. The most engaging items were those that were primarily mathematical that offered a clear challenge, demanded real engagement or raised questions that needed less than simple resolution and as a result required some perseverance and thoughtfulness. The tent task found in item 6 represented an original context with a clear level of authenticity that also required a real understanding of the concepts in an applied situation; however, other applied context were less original in scope (food and fundraisers). |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.7 | There's a lot to like in your supporting materials. My favorite support came in the Proportional Reasoning, Ice Cream and Dream Catcher tasks where you offered some analysis of the possible student responses. That was rare in the task collections that I judged, and it's so crucial for the kind of support teachers can use. Kudos! |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.6 | Overall insufficient feedback to guide instruction, very little support for guiding instruction. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.7 | While some tasks mentioned possible student misconceptions, such notes were rare. Strong teaching notes need to include not only possible student misconceptions, but thoughts on how to help students reason out of the misconception and suggest tasks/questions to help students do so. As a teacher I found the notes mostly unhelpful and would have to spend a considerable amount of time working out the different parts of the problems in detail and planing for interventions and next steps based on the type of work and thinking my students would demonstrate. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.0 | While the instructional use or implications are not fully developed, the rationale offered for each item and what it reveals about student understanding provides key information that would support more effective use of these items within the a classroom setting. While not items were skillfully and precisely presented in terms of there use, item 3 provides a clear statement of the use of the item, what it elicits, and what it reveals about student mastery of the given standards. The information about the item provides the necessary supports for teachers to effectively use the item and understand the student misconceptions that it elicits as well as what the student knows and is able to do. |
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| Elissa Farmer | 58.3 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.6 | While I appreciated the open-ended response items, those items require a great deal more attention to teacher support, anticipating possible misconceptions and teacher responses. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 4.3 | Besides a few instances where a certain question didn't quite get all the way at the thinking being targeted (e.g. students were not likely to solve for p and thus wouldn't have to attend to precision; teachers wouldn't have a way to know who used guess and check vs. solving an equation), the problems assessed both conceptual understanding and skills; a wide range of practices was assessed from sense-making and constructing and critiquing arguments and reasoning abstractly and quantitatively to attending to precision and making use of structure and regularity. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 2.4 | It is a bit unfair to judge these problems in this category as the author deliberately presents a flow from grade 6 to grade 7 and precursor to grade 8. The score is low as a result. Very carefully thought-through structure that does attend to both skill and process. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 2.0 | Variety of input types leads to a variety of practices assessed. That's good. More justification questions would be helpful, even though that would increase the burden for teacher support materials. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 3.2 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 2.4 | Several tasks were tied to 6th and 8th grade standards. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 2.3 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 2.4 | The tasks are tied to grade 6-8 and will assess the selected standards. It would have been nice to take one of the 7th grade standards and have questions that addess the requisite knowledge and the extension questions in the same task. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 4.1 | The items explicitly addressed Equations and Expressions from 6th through 8th grade, giving teachers an opportunity to attend to students' ability to make sense of situations and represent them with calculations and equations; the difficulty of equations progressed through the items and there were opportunities for students to use, and sometime make visible, both formal and informal reasoning about equations. I would have liked to have seen more opportunities for students to make explicit how they were thinking about problems to help teachers diagnose different formal and informal methods. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 4.7 | Assessments cover a wide range of understandings. For example, questions that ask for solutions first ask students to decide numbers that /aren't/ solutions (Q7). Q3 asks for the solution to an equation but also the equations for which a given value could be a solution. Also great. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 3.9 | The author placed deliberate focus on this. The reason then my score is not a full 5 is that I had trouble with some questions in their presentation and clarity. Also, some questions started to verge on the rote. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | The "story-line" of these questions is robust and clear from the perspective of an educator. From the perspective of the student it is clear that this is carefully orchestrated piece and so feels like assessment. Material is not so much presented with good "zing" for students (though a particular strong attempt is made at this with Activity 10). Also, some of the questions have wording troubles.
Activity 4: The word "simplify" is eschewed in the Common Core.
Activity 6: Unclear if stretching is to be counted as exercise. Unclear in the final question what it means to extent over five days? Imagine he does a fifth day as he did for the previous four - in which case the answer is that nothing changes, or that the numerical values given are now to be spread over five days and not four, in which case values do change.
Activity 7: What's a group? Can two or more groups appear on the boat? Or are all the passengers considered one group?
The first question is worded to make it unclear if gear is to be factored into the picture (especially since we don't know how many groups the people are divided into).
Activity 8: Is part A missing?
Activity 10: One answer for two questions? |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 3.5 | Variety of real-world contexts. Different problems accept the context more and less gracefully than others. #1 and #6 both felt like the contexts were thin veneers on math. #7, meanwhile, seemed like math someone in the context might actually use. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | This is a strength of this collection. The tasks were varied and enjoyed the addition of the video and pictures to provide context. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 4.2 | I particularly appreciated the use of video and the invitation to students to first estimate and then evaluate their estimates, or evaluate others' estimates. There weren't any true modeling tasks, but the incorporation a 3-act style task on an individual assessment was impressive. In only one case did the real-world scenario actually get in the way of the math thinking -- asking the students whether an estimate of 12.5 for a problem whose answer was 12, in a situation where being over was far better than being under, and expecting students to say 12 was more correct than 12.5, felt like it ignored the real-world context, to me. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | I appreciated the justification and rationale in the item profiles, and the attempts to use the Item Writer software (which was challenging!) to provide feedback directly to students. I hope that the author gets the opportunity to add more about the misconceptions and informal methods teachers are likely to see, and how to address them (opportunities for targeted instruction). |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.6 | There was limited support for teachers to re-engage students based on their misconceptions. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | Some rubrics were rather vague. On #3, for instance, points were recommended for students who "explained their answer thoroughly" but examples of a thorough explanation weren't offered. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | I found the commentary on this scant (especially since I was confused by the wording of some questions and was looking for the solutions as a means to decipher). More detail would help here in general. |
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| Talia Arbit | 57.7 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.1 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 2.0 | There were lots of opportunities for students to engage in MP1 and MP2, good opportunities for students to engage in MP3 (constructing arguments) and even some opportunities for doing some aspects of MP4, modeling. MP8 might also show up as students move between calculations and writing expressions. I was rarely sure of which standards were being targeted, and most tasks seemed to align better to 6th grade standards. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 3.5 | the tasks definitely assessed student understanding of the standards. to improve the tasks, what MP are being assessed? |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 3.2 | The collection shows attention to intended content standards but a few items are misaligned or would not elicit the intended understandings. Most items are tied to one or more mathematical practice standards, but the connections are neither identified nor discussed in supporting materials. MP1 and MP2 are well addressed, but ties to MP3, MP5, MP7, and MP8 standards are lacking. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 2.5 | Task collection does address major topics within 7th grade, but several are targeted to standards that are not truly addressed by the task. For example, task #1 strongly addresses 7.EE in that students are using patterns, but lists 7.G.A2, which is not really relevant. Tasks with strong alignment are 4.5.10. There is not explicit goal for connecting to practices provided. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 3.5 | The ideas provided in the collection do align with the grade 7 Standards, and do connect to the mathematical practices. However, the items seemed to not be well-connected, but rather hit on many different standards within grade 7. For individual ideas within grade 7, the tasks addressed both understanding and procedure, thus providing feedback to the teacher about students' thinking of the item. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 3.6 | If a teacher used all of the tasks with students, they would get a feel of the students strengths and weaknesses. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | April Strom | COHERENT | 2.7 | The items presented in this collection seem to be more isolated ideas. For example, one item focuses on scale factors while another focuses on probability. There is little to no connection of ideas across the items, although in isolation each are connected to the standards. As a result, it is difficult to determine the conceptual progression of an idea across the collection of items. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 2.6 | tasks like 1 and 9 do provide some opportunity for students to engage in standards below and above grade level, but the tasks do not generally provide evidence of student learning across a range of student understanding. Little connection between complimentary topics are evident. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 2.4 | Hard to tell which standards were being assessed; focusing on "Use variables to represent quantities in a real-world or mathematical problem" which seemed to apply to most items, it seemed that the tasks connected to conceptual progressions of previous years but didn't necessarily go above selected standards or address 7th grade level understanding. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 2.2 | The collection hits a range of different topics without a unifying thread, so conceptual progression is limited. In one or two cases, concepts above grade-levels are presented but not adequately supported or scaffolded (ex. one problem requires knowledge of Pythagorean Theorem - an 8th grade standard). A few problems and solutions contain errors, which also compromise coherence. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 3.7 | All the tasks were interesting and engaging. A few were genuinely real world, such as coiling cable and candy time. The tasks would not necessarily be considering challenging 7th grade tasks according to the Common Core. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 2.6 | Tasks are generally targeted to skill with some framing of real world application. Tasks 4 and 5 would reveal student understanding of concepts, but other tasks would not provide rich evidence of student understanding or ability to decontextualize/contextualize understanding in applying to the real world or to identify relevant information. This is generally done for them within the problem. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | The collection of items are engaging and creative. The item titled "Scaling the Box" was very creative as it requires that students simultaneously thinking about scaling a shape by increasing and decreasing it proportionally. This item requires that students think about scaling all sides of the triangle, particularly for the last item where the triangle needs to be reduced to fit into the red box. For the colored dots activity, it is recommended that the color of the dots be changed. It is difficult to see the black versus blue dots, but it would be made easier if the blue dots were red. This is an issue with color-blind people. A few of the items, such as the Cookie Caper item, are more traditional items that do not seem to push on the mathematics of the student as much as the other ideas. The level of complexity with this application is not high. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 3.5 | The tasks are engaging and the range of complexity is evident. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | Conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and real-life applications are all attended to here. The set contains plenty of creative and interesting problems, a few great modeling tasks, and a variety of problem types. Opportunities to articulate and justify reasoning are limited, however. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.1 | Supporting materials are uneven and not always clear or adequate. A few commentaries show possible responses (which is helpful), but not enough insight is given on students' thinking, potential misconceptions, or how to address them. No feedback / guidance (only the correct solution) is offered when students answered incorrectly. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | Some reference to student misconceptions are provided and are helpful. Little instructional support provided. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.2 | While some of the items seemed to have leveraged student conceptions, and particularly misconceptions, many of the items did not seem to achieve this. Moreover, the supporting materials provided for each item were limited. The collection would have been strengthened if the supporting materials provided evidence of the ideas (not topics!) that were embedded in the items and also articulated how teachers could mitigate the mathematical issues that students may have with the item. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.7 | This is a strength of the collection. The supporting notes clearly describes the misconceptions and the evidence. |
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| Evan Weinberg | 57.1 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.6 | There were errors in the answer checks; students who got incorrect answers were simply told the correct answer rather than being given a hint in many cases; supporting materials vary in detail from item to item, from the very detailed analysis of possible response to Coiling the Cable to the few sentences for Cookie Caper. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 2.7 | I like that the SMP were sometimes listed with the items; however, this needs to be more intentional with the student's expectation in the support materials. limited assessment of MP 1- just answering questions. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 2.4 | The opportunity to engage in any mathematical practices was not evident in the collection. Connections to standards were weak. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 3.3 | The connection to the content standards is always clear and the connection to the practice standards is usually clear. These are an interesting collection of tasks. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 3.8 | The collection takes advantage within each item to develop particular standards as well as to cover multiple standards within a single item. The collection, as a result, assesses a broad range of the 7th grade standards. While perseverance in problem-solving, constructing arguments, precision, understanding structures, and modeling are found within the collection, none of these practices get a strong development. The collection more fully develops the content standards. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 2.9 | While the majority of the standards tagged for each task were appropriate, others need revision of either the task to meet the listed standard or a closer examination of the text of the standards to choose one more appropriate. In example, in task 3 an alignment with 7.EE.A.2 is listed, yet that standard specifically states that students should "understand that rewriting an expression in different forms in a problem context can shed light on the problem and how the quantities in it are related." While the final part of the task does ask a student to select all the expressions that could be used, there is nothing in the task involving understanding how the different versions can "shed light" on the main problem.
Without any teaching notes it's hard to judge the MP's cited for the tasks. I question the use of MP4 and how these tasks get students into that habit of mind. I am also unsure of the use of MP6 in task 6 as MP6 has a focus on precision of language in no where in task 6 is space for student language given beyond "show all work". |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 2.4 | There was a nice range of problems that spanned into some 6th grade standards, though those connections should be made clearer in teacher notes. Tasks attempted to bridge domains and this was much appreciated and good to see.
If there is an overarching progression it is not obvious from working through the problems. Adding something in the supporting materials discussing the arc of the tasks so teachers can better understand what is getting assessed and what is being passed over (because 10 tasks cannot do everything) would be a powerful addition.
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 1.9 | Some of the items were linked but were primarily disconnected. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 3.6 | Coherence within a grade level - finding connections among grade level standards - is well developed within the collection (item 2 connects work with rational number operations, and percents, with the work in expressions and equations and similarly item 9 brings work with equations into conversation with probability). Items, at times, do more overtly connect to the work in previous grade, but the focus in this collection is on assessing a broad set of 7 grade standards and interrelating the work of the grade rather than the work of the standards over time. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 3.1 | There is some attempt to reach students who are below 7th grade; however, the full range is collectively not there. There is also an attempt to reach across domains - this did not always work well and seemed disjointed in some of the context. Cho's is below grade level expectation with possibly the exception of reading load. Variance in quality of the items. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | David Wees | COHERENT | 4.0 | For all of these problems there is opportunity for students to approach the task in a variety of different ways, demonstrating a variety of different mathematical understandings. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | The collection has clear balance between procedural and conceptual understanding required to be able to approach the tasks. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | The items do offer tasks that illustrate how mathematics are applicable in daily life with some offering compelling scenarios or aspects that may engage students. The items are not highly unique (9 does offer a unique context for development of probability), but do demonstrate that when developing items from a context that a multitude of standards can interface with a context. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 2.3 | Problem types were fine, though nothing new to the 7th grade world. I worry that the constant changing of topics and situations will put undue stress onto students with learning disabilities and English language learners.
Mathematically I question solutions asking students to "explain their thinking" when the cited solutions are clearly 'tricks' and do not show real mathematical understanding. In example, in task 4 the phrase "When multiplying or dividing numbers, the result is positive if the numbers have the same sign and opposite if the numbers have opposite signs" is written as part of the solution and the word "opposite" is used twice with different meanings.
In task 9 I strongly suggest re-thinking the wording of the task. I re-read part c multiple times and still am unsure why 8x = 24 is a solution when it reads as though SooJinn only has 8 pieces, though when that happened is also not clear as part A was about how many she _could_ make, not how many she would make.
Small note: the main character in task 10 seems to change names from Wayne to Sammie.
I am also interested to see more connections to the foundational work students do with number lines, tape diagrams, and other visuals throughout K-7. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 2.3 | Few tasks were stimulating although some were connected to real life. Demonstrating skill was predominant. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | Art's Angle - road are not necessarily straight lines - sentence structure needs work. Part C of Devin's discounts is not realistic of how money is spent. "before taxes" Erika's expressions - no expressions are visible. Fantastic Fractions - asked students to convert but does not allow students to present answers. Students may be able to do this without actually converting - students are not required to provide reasoning which could get to misconceptions. Measure what you ask of students. Germaine's - there are other factors to make this more realistic - how far apart should each stone be for appropriate walking stride? This seemed contrived - trying to take a traditional problem into the real world rather than looking at the world to see the mathematics. Wayne's work - did not show up. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.5 | Links supplied some instructional support. Primarily answers were given to calculations or simple rubrics were supplied. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.1 | Support for teachers varies in this collection between somewhat robust and almost non existent. Would like to see more supports for teachers to inform instruction. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.9 | This collection had no instructional supports that informed instruction beyond solutions and a possible rubric for each task. The lack of teaching notes for the tasks to help teachers see connections across grade levels and within the grade level, suggesting next steps, addressing sources of misconceptions and ways to help students rethink their work is hugely detrimental to this collection and needs to be addressed. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.1 | The support materials are clear and well thought out. What would improve them is some commentary on how students might approach the task differently than the solution provided and suggestions for what to do when students present misconceptions about the mathematics. |
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| Kimberly Wofford | 56.5 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.9 | The supporting materials provide clear descriptions of solutions, grading rubrics, and additional resources. While each item holds a great deal of supporting materials do not typically identify the large misconceptions, how to use the items in instructions, or how to address what the item may reveal about student understanding. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 3.2 | Tasks are aligned to the selected standards and assess both procedural fluency and some understanding. The MPS are not as evident. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 4.3 | By and large the questions are right on mark. They are short and swift and not always exciting, but they do sit with the proposed standards. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 3.4 | The tasks fit solidly into the 7th grade standards and clearly assess those they target. Several tasks can be solved using more than one method. Besides "Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them" I had a hard time finding places where practices were explicitly woven in (perhaps because all tasks used the same word problem format -- there weren't opportunities to show that the student was expected to make use of repeated reasoning or critique the reasoning of others or look for structure, for example). The notable exception was Buying Tires, which is one of only w item I have seen so far (out of 90!) that actually addresses MP4, Model with Mathematics. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 3.9 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 2.2 | While aspects of specific standards were assessed (calculate percent increase, or create an equation, solve an equation), the practice standards were underdeveloped and the development of the targeted standards was selective. For example, several items are from the cluster 7.RP.A where in that cluster the use of multiple representations, including tables, diagrams and graphs to understand, show, and explain proportionality is highlighted. The items covering this set focus exclusively on equations and verbal descriptions. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 1.6 | The items within the collection did not utilize the fulness of the tool to develop multi-step items or items that can show a progression of an idea within a single item itself. The collection develops items to address specific aspects of a standard, but not in a way that connects to the work across grades or within the grade itself. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 3.4 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 3.1 | I am more troubled here. The questions feel like simple rote questions, in the end, with no development of ideas that could have been pushed further to give an interesting thinking experience for students and a range of ideas for educators to look at and ascertain a good picture of student understanding. Missed opportunities. The collection feels like ten problems in a homework sheet, somewhat disconnected, to be handed in the next day, graded, recorded, and then moved on from. I didn't get any sense of wanting to linger on any ideas. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 2.6 | The tasks generate a deep understanding of the standards, both at the entry level and extended level. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 2.4 | I feel that I could use these items to determine if the students have mastered the standards presented; some target skills and others would give me evidence of conceptual understanding, as I assessed whether students had any basis on which to make progress and attempt a solution. Looking across the scoring guidelines and items, I would have trouble using these tasks to diagnose *why* a student had failed to make progress; what misconceptions does she have? What understanding *does* she have that I could build on? Because these tasks are open-ended they might address this; however, the teacher materials didn't support me to make sense of student answers in a diagnostic way nor are there intermediate questions that help me see whether a student, say, understands how to solve the problem but can't turn that into an equation. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 2.2 | Most of the items within the collection did not vary in complexity either in how the information was conveyed, numerical sets being used, the demand upon student output, or in problem-solving. While the collection did include students creating and solving equations, the algebraic structures in those items were presented transparently via verbal descriptions such that students could write them, not by knowing the context but rather by applying a generic understanding of traditional word problems. The collection as a whole did not develop students conceptual understanding of proportionality, but more procedural knowledge in more traditional applied contexts. The collection does maintain an applied narrative throughout, which pushes the collection beyond performing simple algorithms or applying a basic formula. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 3.5 | I found the contexts to be realistic and, for the most part, engaging. In a few cases I found that the context made the math question unclear to me; in other cases the context helped me to think about the math, and in the case of Buying Tires, the question really did ask me to apply my math knowledge to a complex, real-world scenario. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 3.8 | It is hard, I know, to always attend to this "real life" call without the problem being forced and unrealistic. Some questions felt forced on that level. There are some wording issues here and there. For example, Activity 8: What do you mean by one side of a Ferris Wheel? Activity 3: What does it mean for rectangles to be proportional? (The usual word in this context is "similar", but now we're in different territory. Activity 2: Is $125 the current sale price of the tire or the usual price before the sale?
The notation used in Activity 6 is troubled with its use o units: 1.8*(C deg) + 32 deg. Same issue occurs in presentation of the solution. Activity 10: Should we assume there is a linear relationship twixt copper price and amount?
There are also some "why do I care" issues. For example, why does Stacy want to represent her height as a percentage increase? |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | The collection of tasks are all open-ended with limited interaction. Also, there is no space to enter a response. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.8 | It would be helpful if some of the solutions (activity 4, activity 5) did not lead to equations with whole number solutions. Additional depth and information could be obtained from seeing how students handle fractional parts. The scoring rubrics are fine, very basic, what anyone would likely do. I feel like many of these problems can be expanded into great thinking and informative experiences. A lot of good potential. Just all too tight and a bit rote at present. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.7 | Rubric for scoring were very clear and concise. However, there was no mention of instructional supports for misconceptions. Due to the fact that there was no area to enter an answer, there was also no feedback to students after hitting submit. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.5 | While rubrics and keys are provided they do not provide insights into student misconceptions (rather what earns or does not earn a point, or the right answer); how, why, or when one might use this item; or what instructional steps to take prior to or after using the item in the classroom. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.9 | I appreciated the rubric format. However, in many cases the rubric simply focused on whether or not students met the selected standard, but not on helping me understand or diagnose why or how the student was or wasn't able to solve the problem. Knowing more than just that the student was wrong and that the mistake was in calculation vs. set up is extremely helpful when doing formative assessment and planning how to support students. |
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| Steve Hughes | 56.3 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.4 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 2.7 | Connection to targeted standards are clear in more than half of the items but not quite accurate in others. A few items could be correctly answered without involving the knowledge or skills specified in the referenced standards. Ties to mathematical practice standards are present in each item but are not explicitly identified or discussed in supporting materials. MP2 and MP4 are well addressed. Ties to MP5, MP7, and MP8 are lacking. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 2.3 | While the task collection does address some of the major works of 7th grade, the tasks do not make clear connections to the practices. Many of the tasks had a loose or incomplete association to the targeted standards. For example, the "bottled water" task does ask students to calculate a unit rate (7.RP.A1) but does not demand that this unit rate be of quantities "associated with ratios of fractions." Some tasks do demonstrate a balance of understanding and procedure (#5 is especially strong here), but most are focused more on procedural thinking. One strength of the collection is the ask of students to write equations that represent real world situations, but students are not asked to make use of the structure or meaning of these models. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 3.3 | The focus on the standards for these items is fairly good. I wonder if we will be able to know in each case if the student has mastered the standard or not. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 3.0 | The collection develops a multitude of contexts for applying a key concept in seventh grade - the concept of unit rate. In addition, the items consistently require use of the rational number system and assess students ability to fluently work within the rational number system. The collection does not assess a conceptual understanding of proportional relationships or the ability to generalize or interpret expressions, tables, graphs or equations of those relationships. For example, Item 7 is the only problem in the collection that calls for a model, but is an item that could have been within the purview of 6th grade and does further develop or extend that idea from 6th into 7th grade. Mathematical practice 1 is recurrent throughout the set and the items reward students who can effectively reason quantitatively, but the emphasis within 7th grade on conceptual understanding of ratios and proportions as well as expressions equations suggests a need to further develop a sense of structure as well as more aspects of the modeling cycle (Item 5 is a strong example of modeling within the statistics strand of 7th grade). |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 2.8 | The items were aligned well. Some of the tasks targeted both understanding and procedure, others didn't. I tended to give average scores to nearly every participant unless the tasks showed something extraordinary in terms of alignment. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 2.2 | Items in the collection hit a range of topics without clear connections or a unifying thread, so conceptual progression is limited. A number of problems and solutions contain errors, problematic premises, or unclear phrasing, which also compromise coherence. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 4.0 | In order to determine student understanding at a wide level there need to be tasks that allow some openness in response. Some of your tasks nail this. Wind Power stood out to me for the way it gave an opening for students to explain. So did Recycling Distribution. Other tasks assessed understanding more narrowly -- Tax and Tip, Pizza Party -- but you have a lot of great assessment tasks here. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 3.0 | Despite the lack of development within the Geometry standards as well as a richer treatment of a conceptual understanding of ratios and proportions and that of expressions and equations, the set clearly articulates the numerical expectations required of students within the seventh grade. As a collection it reaches at time to the upper limits of 6th grade numerical expectations and pushes to the core expectations of 7th grade. Students able to fluently calculate and respond to the demands of this collection are numerically ready to address the expectations of 8th grade. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | David Wees | COHERENT | 1.8 | While I think shorter problems like this can be excellent for using with students, a limitation is that it often makes it more difficult, particularly in an online environment to uncover the full range of ways students might think about a particular standard. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 2.6 | Some of the tasks are accessible to students at a 6th grade level, but few would provide helpful evidence of student reasoning above the 7th grade level. Few make connections between standards within 7th grade. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 3.5 | I thought most of the problems offered were interesting and I wanted to try and figure them out. Some of the problems were more limited in scope though because I thought it would be hard to extend the problem. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 3.8 | A strong collection in terms of engaging, relevant tasks and finds through the first half of the items a context in the environment around which to develop the mathematical concepts explored in 7th grade. While some items are scaffolded and/or lower in complexity, other items engage students to conduct multiple steps and reason about claims or results. The skill set explored here relies primarily on understanding a particular context and conducting a correct series of calculations. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 1.6 | While most tasks include a context for the mathematics, rarely does this context require an understanding of a concept. Tasks 4 and 5 are notable exceptions where students are asked to draw some conclusion beyond using an equation to calculate a specific value. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 3.8 | Some of your tasks were very creative. I loved loved Recycling Distribution. Marble Jar was also clever. Wind power was great. Adding to Zero is such a clever idea for a task. Other tasks were more conventional (Tax and Tip, Pizza Party) but overall the collection was strong. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 3.7 | Conceptual understanding, procedural fluency, and real-life applications are all attended to in the set. Some real-world modeling tasks are well chosen / framed. The range of thinking level required could've been wider, though. Most tasks required Level 2 DOK, (even though they were tagged with 3's.) More precision in problem setup and phrasing are also needed in several items (ex. making assumptions explicit, using precise terms, etc.) |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.1 | Supporting materials are given but generally only show possible solutions and, in some cases, scoring rubrics. Narratives help to show conceptual ideas but don't offer adequate insights into student thinking, potential misconceptions, or how to address misunderstandings. No guidance or hints are offered to students for incorrect answers. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.3 | This collection offers supporting materials that provide an insight into what misconception, big idea, or concept that the item can elicit as well as exemplar responses or expectations of students responses that support a more skillful and meaningful use of items within the classroom. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | Some of these problems I thought really hit the mark in terms of helping teachers find out the conceptions of students but for others it would be more challenging to unpack the work of the student. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.8 | Some narrative provided in supporting materials but these add little more than a reference to the target standard. There is little to support a teacher in predicting or interpreting student misconceptions or subsequent impact of evidence on instruction. |
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| Colleen Werner | 56.2 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.3 | The supporting materials were good, but didn't dig into student misconceptions much. You could have done this for something like Wind Power. What explanations from students should the teacher anticipate seeing? What are the implications of these different responses? The dominant offering of your supporting materials were the narrative (essentially an answer key with a description of the question?) and the rubric, which helps with marking. That said, the rubric and narratives are quite helpful, even if they don't dig in as far as I would have liked. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 2.8 | Some of the tasks addressed prerequisites to the standards instead of the standard. (CCSS calls for students to interpret p + q in terms of distance, and two tasks asked kids to work within the distance model.) |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Karim Ani | ALIGNED | 2.7 | For some activities, the difficulty level would likely be too high for a student unfamiliar with the given concepts. For instance, the goal of the "0.8 both ways" activity is ostensibly for students to explore adding and subtracting a negative quantity. However, the increments on the scale (0.2 rather than 0.1) and the amount itself (0.8 rather than an integer) make the question more difficult than it needed to be, and risk distracting students from the actual goal. For other activities, the instructions were so confusing that it's unclear what a 7th grade student would learn from them; "Not too big angles" seems more like a high-level puzzle for someone already deeply familiar with the given topic than an activity designed for novice middle school students. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 2.5 | Items are generally correlated to the content standards though don't consistently elicit nuanced evidence of understanding. A few tasks are not accurately aligned or supported (ex. targeting above-grade level expectations but not scaffolded). Most problems do activate at least a couple of mathematical practices (MP1, MP2, and MP6 in particular), but they are neither clearly identified or effectively woven into the tasks. MP3, MP4, MP5, and MP8 are noticeably lacking, even though in many cases there is great potential to integrate them. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 3.7 | The first question does address the standard's demand that students thinking of adding positive and negative distances, but does not make explicit the connection to addition as an operation to distance and absolute value. This is the main idea of the standard. However, the levels of sophistication described in the supporting details is well described and would be helpful to enacting teachers. The collection as a whole is well balanced between understanding and procedure. It might be improved by clarifying some of the language in the prompts. It is at times vague or unclear ("which letter marks one on the axis?" is an example). Using the language of the standards could help make the directions more universally clear. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 3.4 | Meets content standard. Practice standard connections weren't explicit, though some were implicit in the problem itself. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 2.2 | Use of number line and representations are helpful for assessing what tools students are using and indicating where their understanding falls on a conceptual-representative-abstract scale in the range above and below 7th grade. The collection provides students opportunity to use 6th grade ratio reasoning, but would be strengthened by including opportunities for students to demonstrate proportional relationships in the form y= kx (7.RPA.2c) which is the bridge to linear reasoning in 8th grade. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 2.6 | Parts of the collection do show some conceptual progression, but the entire collection lacks a unifying thread and thus appears disjointed. Overall not enough scaffolding exist within or across items to show linkages between concepts. Some problems are not precisely set up or show incorrect solutions, which also compromised coherence. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Karim Ani | COHERENT | 3.0 | The collection attempted to address a wide range of clusters, including 7.NS, 7.RP, and 7.EE. While this could be an effective way of tying concepts together and developing a "story" of Grade 7 math, the activities in this collection felt disconnected from one another: more like random tasks than steps in a coherent narrative. While this collection provides students an opportunity to "touch" a range of topics, there is none which was explored in sufficient depth. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 2.6 | Some of these problems could be solved by students competent in earlier years standards. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 2.5 | It would be difficult to reflect the progressions unless all ten items draw from the same domain. These assessment items moved between domains, resulting in more breadth across domains but less depth and progress in one domain. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | Some of the problems I found hard to follow. I had to keep reading and rereading "The art of mixing" to make sure that I got the language right. Some of the tasks were very original, like the "not too big angles" problem. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 3.6 | Original perspectives in the task help elicit evidence of student understanding. While some of the problems do ask students to apply understanding in real life contexts - car efficiency, mixing drinks, etc - the collection could be improved by providing students opportunities to make value decisions about what variables are important, the validity of a mathematical model, and other skills outlined in MP4. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Karim Ani | RIGOROUS | 2.6 | Many of the conceptual understanding activities were too difficult to elicit the desired understanding. Meanwhile, the applications tasks felt contrived; for instance, it's unlikely that anyone would ever describe the area of a pizza as "16 pi square inches," and the conversation around juice ratios felt equally forced. That said, the "car fuel efficiency" activity was very good. It was clear and focused; even though it was a relatively simple task, it is exactly this simplicity that will help students understand the meaning and purpose of unit rates. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | Collection includes quite a few creative problems that require higher-level thinking and conceptual understanding. There is also a good range of complexity. Meaningful real-world applications, however, are short in supply. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 2.4 | In some cases the real-world context got in the way of the mathematical assessment. For instance in the pitcher problem, it wasn't clear if all the sub-problems referred to the same pitcher. Whether or not they did, the sub-problems made more and less sense. In general, there was a range of examples and contexts and mathematical understandings targeted. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | Helpful supporting documentation for each question. Possible misconceptions and alternate strategies clearly thought through in advance. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Karim Ani | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.1 | The supporting materials were helpful and well thought-out. The discussion of increments in "0.8 both ways" is likely to be valuable for a teacher, as is the table in "the art of mixing." However, many of the tasks themselves are so difficult or confusing that a teacher would need much more support, including better guidance on requisite prior knowledge. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.9 | Especially strong in naming the mathematics of the tasks, with the exception of task one, where the alignment to the standard is less congruent. Could be strengthened with more support for teachers as to how the evidence elicited from the task might inform future instruction. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.3 | Supporting materials are minimal and uneven. Conceptual ideas and ways to solve are usually pointed out, but inadequate attention is given to potential misunderstandings or how to remedy them. Insufficient feedback is given to incorrect student response (most of the time, only correct solutions are shown). The chosen formats of problems are also not always the most suitable, i.e. not conducive or targeted enough to elicit students' thinking. |
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| Alexei Kassymov | 54.8 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.8 | The instructional support raised potential mistakes or misunderstandings several times. I didn't see a clear approach that helped the teacher see tendencies in students' thinking about number lines and ratios. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 3.0 | The collection shows careful attention to intended content standards (though a couple of items are incorrectly tagged / misaligned). All items are tied to at least one mathematical practice standards but none are explicitly identified or discussed in supporting materials. MP2, MP3, and MP6 are well attended to, but meaningful ties to other practice standards are lacking. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Karim Ani | ALIGNED | 2.6 | Many of the activities in the collection focused almost entirely on procedures and did not provide students with much opportunity to engage meaningful with mathematics or demonstrate the level of mathematical thinking requires by the CCMP. Moreover, while the activities were for the most part correctly aligned to the standards listed, the emphasis on procedure was unlikely to help students better understand the underlying concepts. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 4.1 | Tasks are closely aligned to the standards targeted in the profiles. Tasks do make use of SMP1, 2, and 7 by asking students to write and interpret the structure of expressions, equations, and inequalities for quantities in real life. Tasks do ask students to critique the answers to questions provided by others, but could be strengthened by focusing more explaining the reasoning of the speaker as well as their "answer." This would also provide more of a balance of understanding and procedure across the tasks. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 2.6 | The items in the collection seem to align with the 7th grade standards. The collection could be strengthened if the items covered a broader scope of the standards, including the mathematical practices. As such, the items are mostly drag/drop and free response items, so it is difficult to determine the ways in which the author envisions students to think about the mathematics and the practices they should elicit. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 2.8 | Wide range of standards represented. Emphasis on practices, esp. seeing structure and constructing arguments. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | April Strom | COHERENT | 2.1 | The focus of the collection is on equivalent expressions, solving equations, and solving inequalities. However, the connections among these mathematical topics does not seem to be highlighted, thus it is difficult to determine the coherency of these items. The collection would be strengthened if the progression of ideas was more pronounced in the items, and perhaps if more items would provided so that the progression could be realized. The collection could be strengthened if items could be revised to include more non-free response items to better determine the progression of ideas (rather than a collection of tasks). |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Karim Ani | COHERENT | 2.3 | The first activity in the collection had students evaluate expressions such as -3(x-15). The level of difficulty involved is likely far beyond where 7th grade students would be at this point in their mathematical trajectory. In a sense, the activities in the collection felt a bit like throwing students into the deep end of the pool when in fact they're just learning how to swim. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 3.3 | The collection shows a unifying thread (equations & expressions) and some conceptual connections, but the range of concepts is quite limited, both within and across grade level. Other standards in 7.EE domain or that are outside of it but are complementary could've strengthen the collection. A couple of errors in the items also compromise coherence. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 3.0 | I appreciated several of the later items, which emphasized solution /and/ explanation, increasing the range of understanding assessed. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 2.6 | The first two tasks would elicit evidence of student reasoning along a progression of understanding, but the tasks that target solving equations focus so much on specific prescriptive steps, that student reasoning is limited to this methodology. These could be strengthened by providing a more open entry for students below or above grade level.The "art collection" and "menu" tasks is a strong example of a tasks that would elicit evidence of student understanding. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Karim Ani | RIGOROUS | 2.1 | For the most part, the questions in the activities focused on procedures rather than concepts or applications. Questions asked students to arrange solution steps in order and use drop-down menus to write equations. While these are important skills for students to master, the collection as a whole provided students with little opportunity to explore the meaning of the mathematics. Meanwhile, the ostensible real-world tasks such as "Art Collection" felt inauthentic, and seemed motivated more by the desire to provide a context for writing expressions than the actual application of them. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 2.4 | Good balance between concept and procedure. Some of the real world examples seemed contrived and complicated enough to interfere with an assessment of the math, though. (eg. the art collection.) |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 3.6 | engaging and informative tasks. The focus on understanding equivalent expressions through out the collection would elicit evidence of student understanding of structure. Tasks could be strengthened by asking students to interpret the meaning of expressions and equations in mathematical models or to ask students to determine relevant quantities, etc. This would elicit more helpful information as to students ability to apply problem solving skills. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 2.9 | The items in this collection are creative, but still rather traditional in form. The use of free response items is good, but the collection could be strengthened if the author leveraged other dynamic capabilities of the system when constructing the items. As is, the items are have limited challenge-ability for students. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 1.9 | Overall, items in the set are rather routine in nature. A couple of items call for good reasoning and conceptual understanding but quite a few tasks (and their supporting materials) lean toward procedures. A few relevant real-world contexts are present but are not always appealing or fitting. The set also lacks variety in the types and complexity of problems. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Karim Ani | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.8 | The author provided scoring rubrics for individual questions, something that is sure to help teachers in assessing the tasks. However, other than providing answers to the questions, the author provided little pedagogical support; indeed, while the "Phone Company Refunds" activity included an option to view sample student work, the work itself was missing. Given the level of difficulty of some of the activities, novice and even veteran teachers would likely need much more guidance for how to effectively teach the tasks. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.3 | Supporting materials are inconsistent. Some scoring guides are quite helpful, others are vague or do not inform instruction in a meaningful way. Commentaries are uneven in quality. Most notably, not enough attention is given to conceptual ideas, student thinking, and possible student misconceptions. No guidance (only the correct solution) is offered if students respond incorrectly. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.2 | The collection did not incorporate items with clear connections to student (mis)conceptions. The supporting materials provided for the items provided good things to pay attention to when grading, but this information had limited ability to convey the (mis)conceptions that teachers should be attending to when teaching these ideas. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | Tasks are clearly written with an understanding of common misconceptions central to 7th grade standards and elicit evidence of these in student thinking. This is especially true for the "equivalent expressions" tasks where it is made explicit in the supporting materials. Unfortunately, the additional sample work and rubrics focus more on scoring for correctness and could be strengthened with commentary on what understanding the task is meant to uncover and how this evidence would inform instruction. |
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| Mariam Brunner | 53.8 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.4 | Carefully considered support materials described a range of student understandings and misunderstandings. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 2.7 | The author is very good at creating short, pithy questions that get right at the specific piece of mathematical skill each standard wants to address. All is well aligned, but all feels limited and a little short-sighted at times, alas, and forced. One wouldn't naturally solve question 5 by setting up an inequality, and one doesn't naturally use the jargon "proportional" when discussing hourly rates in question 6, and no-one thinks about comparing tables in the way described in question 9, for example.. So for the sake of assessing whether or not students know the math jargon, can set up high-powered algebra to solve problems, and, technically meet the standards, then we're there. But it feels we're missing the context and the mathematical common sense we really want students to employ. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 2.5 | Items seemed to emphasize calculation more than concept. Items might have benefited from the addition of a text box where students could explain their answers. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 2.5 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 2.4 | Some of the items do a nice job targeting 7th grade standards and have multiple ways that students can approach them if they understand the underlying concept (a sign that they address understanding as well as procedure. Others of the items assume that students will use a 7th-grade level procedure (e.g. writing an equation, finding a unit rate with non-whole numbers) but the problem can more easily be solved by more elementary standards, missing the opportunity to assess the 7th grade standard. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 2.8 | The tasks were, overall, aligned to CCSS for Grade 7. I wasn't especially picky in this area, and I gave an average score to anything that didn't have any major issues or merits. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 3.6 | Supports a broad range of understandings – proportionality, expressions, inequalities, rate, etc. – and a few items offered a range of entry points. The tabletop question asks for a relative comparison rather than a calculation, for instance. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 3.0 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 2.4 | While most of the tasks could be solved with multiple methods, the teacher support materials provided no information about multiple approaches to the tasks; only information about the 7th grade procedures was provided. The tasks did include some percent and proportional reasoning problems that students could do with pre-7th-grade understanding, giving teachers some opportunity to assess if students are ready for 7th grade standards. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 2.0 | Because the questions are so short and pointed there isn't much room for wider thinking and assessment. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 2.6 | The tasks were somewhat narrow, especially some of the multiple choice questions. I think it would be hard to get specific information about student understanding from something like the Store Bill task. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 2.4 | Many of these questions fall into the trap of insisting that students *don't* step back from a question and ascertain "What is the most natural and sensible way to think of this question?" That's a skill we so want for our next generation! Questions 3, 5, 6, and 9, for example, are testing jargon and unnatural textbook answers. There are some correctness issues. For example, question 7 needs to be "**approximately** a 16:21 ratio" because the answers are not fractional (but then we run into the problem - who would choose the numbers 16 and 21 for an approximate ratio?) , and question 8 needs to state what two variables are being discussed in each example (I assume, for the taxi cab we're talking about distance traveled and fare paid). |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 3.2 | In some items, the real-world contexts in the problems supported students' mathematics reasoning, and their math reasoning in turn helped them do authentic "real-world" work, for example, the problems about Employee's Hourly Rates, and Home Improvement Store Bill. In other cases, students' real-world knowledge could get in the way of them getting the right answer, for example Cable Bill, Players in a Softball League, or Running Sneaker Prices. All of the contexts are engaging, and for those problems where the context is far-fetched (Dimensions of Table Tops, Tulip Tree) the mathematics is interesting. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 2.1 | The tasks were solidly real-world, but I'd seen them all before in one way or another. Several of the tasks focused on percent increase of decrease in ways that struck me as fairly typical applications of those ideas. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 2.7 | A number of applications to real life, though, those applications were generally rooted in calculation or the execution of a single procedure. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.1 | Given the brevity of the questions, the appropriate instructive material was there for that amount of content. But all could have been fleshed out more and developed into fuller and more appealing, and fun, content for students to think about and play with. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.4 | Strong teacher materials offer a solution strategy and other teacher notes. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 3.1 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.8 | In the large majority of the items, only a single approach was identified. Few attempts were made to help teachers understand students' multiple conceptions, methods of approach, or how to build from more informal methods to the more formal methods presented. |
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| Monique Colbert | 50.8 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.0 | The supporting materials effectively acted as an answer key. This is good, but the rubric is asking for more than that, and these materials don't point out conceptions or misconceptions in a way that gets at real understanding that might be going on. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 2.0 | Targeted standards did not include a wide range of standards for algebra ready. Students had limited opportunities to engage in the mathematical practices. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 3.6 | The collection has strong moments developing the statistics/probability and geometry clusters (Items 1, 3, 6, 8, and 9) with an emphasis on conceptual understanding combined with procedural skill. In addition, the items from those domains assess students ability to reason, classify, and judge claims. The collection also provides two items that deeply assess conceptual understanding of signed numbers. The set does not sufficiently develop the concept of proportionality nor expressions and equations, which represent the major work of the grade; the lack of emphasis on these standards also may limit the development of modeling within the collection. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 3.3 | The only problem that I thought was not well aligned to the standards was the problem about the area of a circle. This seems like students would need to understand similarity of circles and be able to scale between them in order to be successful. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 3.4 | The collection continuously required students to reason and make sense of problems. They were connected to the standards. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 2.9 | Attention to SP standards and use of formats such as A-S-N to get at student understand beyond rote memorization of facts or mechanical application of skills were appreciated aspects of this collection.
The single-standard alignment nature of these tasks would benefit from being expanded upon. In example, task 9 clearly brings in RP reasoning, but only 7.SP is mentioned. As a teacher I also would like to know what aspect of the standard the writer intends to illuminate with their task (as no single task can fully illuminate all aspects of a standard).
The lack of notes with respect to what mathematical practices the writer intended the students to engage in is a major lack in this collection and the major determiner of the score. Depending on how the tasks are approached in a class (what came before? how are students being grouped?), it isn't completely possible to understand which MP's the students might exemplify. While I know where I would take these items with a class and what MPs I would emphasize, I cannot base scoring on my personal experience but rather the presented ideas of the task writer. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | David Wees | COHERENT | 1.8 | The question about probability I think does a fantastic job of uncovering common student misconceptions about probability but many of the other questions look like they are just looking for right vs wrong answer. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 3.5 | Item 10 is a strong example of building a problem from below the selected standards (starting with grade 5 concepts of volume) up to 7th grade content. This particular item demonstrates a strong coherence that occurs between the algebraic fundamentals being built in 7th grade with their application to securely held volume content. The majority of the collection, however, while clearly requiring mastery of previous standards, does not include items that assess a conceptual progression broadly. The set does offer several items that assess the grade level standards well. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 3.6 | The topics were not necessarily complementary. Students’ answers could give indication of their understanding but adding questions that required them to explain their thinking would have been useful. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 1.7 | Not a coherent collection of items to assess algebra ready - narrow in focus. Could use reasoning measures throughout the set, instead of primarily answer getting. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 2.6 | While the more novel problem types help to suss out some levels of student understanding from those students who are stuck at memorizing steps, there was no opportunity in this collection for students to justify their reasoning and explain their solution paths. It is this latter opportunity where understanding of student level truly becomes evident from the connections the students make to the vocabulary they use. At the end of this collection a student that has done well I would feel has some grasp of grade 7 mathematics (number sense and statistics primarily), but I am left wondering how they would fair in more open-ended modeling type problems. In example, for the last task I would like to pull most of the structure and just ask the student to explain how they would figure out how many bricks are needed for 3 rows, 5 rows, x rows and then see what they do.
Notes on connections between the tasks in this collection, between the tasks and how they tie into grade 6 and grade 8 thinking (and beyond) would improve this collection. If there are coherent threads from start to end in this collection, they are not obvious enough to notice. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 3.2 | A variety of question types might be more engaging for students. The questions ranged in levels of complexity and were mostly connected to real life. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 2.7 | The collection offers a strong balance between mathematical and real-world contexts. The mathematical tasks offer a greater depth of engagement and challenge that require students to negotiate a variety of claims (Items 1, 5, 6, and 8) and wrestle with concepts in unfamiliar or unique contexts. The real world tasks, while worthwhile, are more traditional in general and are less stimulating. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 2.9 | Some of these tasks are well situated in complex contexts, but some of them are not. While it's certainly not critical for learning that every problem be necessarily situated in a real life context, that does seem to be an emphasis of this particular criterion. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 3.1 | The emphasis of this collection of "conceptual understanding" was good to see, but I would have liked to have seen more 'complex real-world problems'. Specifically, I wonder about giving the more abstract tasks such as #1, #5, #6, or #8 to 7th graders and if those types of problem should be valued above problems where students have to work and reason inside of a real world context. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 2.7 | This set offered a variety of item types and situations. Some of the items were awkwardly worded and confusing. Notably - dot plots, sampling methods, understanding addition and subtraction, angles of triangles. Wording of items should be clear and concise and options should get at student's misconceptions not lend to the confusion. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.9 | While questions often related to possible student misconceptions there were no supporting materials in any of the items. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | Most of these questions would be very instructive for teachers and would help them record student misconceptions. What is missing, and this may be a flaw of the platform, is a way of knowing what thinking students did in order to come to their conclusions. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.5 | There were no supporting materials for this collection beyond some simple feedback one right/wrong answers for some problems. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.6 | While each item is aligned, there is no offering of guidance on instruction, the misconceptions it might elicit, or why a particular item was selected. |
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| Jacob Feldman | 49.7 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.1 | There were many opportunities missed when it comes to connecting student misconceptions and providing instructional supports for teachers. Supporting materials were lacking in this area. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 3.3 | The tasks are fairly well aligned to the standards although in a couple of cases new concepts are introduced through the questions. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 3.2 | Tasks in this collection address a range of grade 7 standards and several tasks work to blend domains, which is great to see.
I question the alignment on tasks 1, 4, 5, 7, and 10. In example, for task 5, which is about volume and surface area of two 3d prisms, the standards 7.G.B.4 and 7.G.B.5 are cited. Those two standards are about circles and angles, respectively, and have no connection to the task that is apparent. In task 10 a grade 3 standard is cited without any explanation on why that specific throwback standard has been pulled in.
This collection is missing information from the writer on what aspects of the standard(s) is being addressed (as no single task can fully illuminate a standard) and would benefit from this addition.
Lastly, there is no reference to the Mathematical Practices, which is something a writer cannot expect a teacher to pick up just by reading through a problem and one possible solution. What MP's a person sees a task emphasize is based on their own biases/preferences, so knowing what an author was hoping to see from students during the course of a collection would greatly improve the understanding of the arc/flow of the collection. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 2.0 | Several items did not align to the targeted standards. There was little opportunity to engage in the mathematical practices. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 2.8 | The tasks were well aligned. I wasn't too picky or careful in my judging of alignment -- unless there's something that stood out as extremely strong or extremely problematic, in terms of alignment, I gave an average score. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 2.7 | Items varied with quality and clear connections to content standards and SMP including precision to language. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 3.8 | I liked the range of problem types in this collection. Students have opportunities to answer both single number solution questions as well as short response and reasoning questions. The wording on a few questions could use some refinement for clarity as the way a few are written I would be left wondering if a student's incorrect response is from their own misunderstanding or from misreading the question (ex: task 10 part C doesn't make total sense to me if the tank starts out full and nothing indicates that it isn't full).
A nice addition would be commentary on the tasks specifically citing how it ties into previous grades and/or later grades. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 3.1 | Several of the set up could have been stronger - e.g., Wasted Kwh additionally part D for this one is awkwardly worded and why would you use 360 days in a year? Students should question this - not just go through the motions of doing math. Cubic to triangular more packing material and more product out? Students should question the "new" packaging decision. Opportunities missed for students to make connections. As a set this is contrived situational mathematics - There is an attempt to connect domains and not assess standards in isolation. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 0.7 | I felt that the questions didn't go deep or wide. A question like three toothpicks is only possible to answer correctly if the kid knows what sides can make triangles. Likewise, rather than figuring out how students think about proportional contexts a number of questions depend on students knowing and identifying the constant of proportionality. d's measure was another task that felt like it targeted a particular standard, but would not give a teacher much information on a student's conceptual readiness for related ideas before or after. The question that, I felt, best nailed "coherence" was "Larry or Moe," because it allowed for explanation of a genuinely controversial situation. That question, I thought, was great. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 1.9 | Several tasks/topics were disconnected. Assessment to student understanding was limited. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | David Wees | COHERENT | 2.9 | Most of the questions offer opportunities to find out about a wide range of student understanding but a few of the tasks will be inaccessible to some students. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 4.1 | Task contexts were good. I especially like task 6 and it's structure. I see a lot of tasks in my line of work so I don't see anything here that is unexpected, but the effort put into using contexts that students could understand and picture is appreciated. The variety of problem types give opportunities for students to show what they understand. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 3.9 | The challenge of the tasks seems appropriate in most cases. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 2.7 | This collection does not have a balance - there are items on each extreme. From open entry items to selecting a named point on a number line. Some original ideas but authentic math is often lost. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 2.2 | Collection had a large emphasis on procedural fluency, some on applications and little in conceptual understanding. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 1.7 | This is obviously subjective, but I felt that nearly every problem in the collection I had seen before in one form or another. A few questions surprised and excited me: Larry or Moe, Shaded Region and Center of Line were both interesting and stood out from the rest. d's measure and three toothpicks seemed fairly conventional to me. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.0 | There were essentially no teaching notes addressing student misconceptions, possible next steps or ways to target instruction based on results. This lack of "robust instruction supports" is a huge detriment to an otherwise nice collection. Teachers should not have to make assumptions on what the task writer is hoping the task will accomplish. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.6 | The instructional support materials only show the answers and scoring guide for the problems, which although useful, may make it challenging for some teachers to use these tasks formatively since little to no suggestions of how students might approach these tasks are given. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.2 | The supporting materials offered only answers or links to videos or other websites that contain explanations of content. There wasn't much engagement with student misconceptions or understanding that I saw in the supporting materials. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.5 | While there were answers for most of the items, there was little effort made in addressing misconceptions to help guide instruction. |
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| Maria Clodina Mejia | 48.2 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.9 | I like the rubric supports but beyond that there was not much support for teachers or determining student's misconceptions. For example, d's measure no reasoning required for choices and no support to teachers for possible student misconceptions. Be careful with language to make sure items do not lead to student's misconceptions - definition of midpoint is not precise language. Fish Mama's students could easily get caught up in the words - toothpick I was able grab toothpicks to make an equilateral and an isosceles but both were incorrect and yet those lengths can make a triangle. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 3.9 | Almost all tasks align closely to targeted standards (Smoothies doesn't address 7.RP.A3). Collection could be strengthened by including tasks that explicitly connect to SMPs. For example, asking students to evaluate validity of models, to interpret structure of an expression, or to make use of repeated reasoning. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 2.2 | Overall, everything seemed aligned. My only concern was the Smoothie question, which seemed less about rates and more about the relative size of 1/2, 1/4 and 1/8. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | David Wees | ALIGNED | 2.3 | Most of the tasks are able to gather information on both conceptual understanding and procedural understanding. Some tasks are too narrow in scope to be able to do both. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 3.5 | Connection to targeted standards are clear in most items. Ties to mathematical practice standards are present in each item but are not explicitly identified or discussed in supporting materials. MP2, MP3, and MP6 are well addressed, but meaningful ties to MP4, MP5, MP7, and MP8 are lacking. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 1.4 | Students were commonly asked to explain answers. Scoring guides were sporadically offered, however, and matched a different task in at least one case (#7). |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 2.9 | These tasks could definitely be solved using a few different ideas from earlier grades. They weren't narrow, right/wrong questions that are too narrowly targeting a specific idea that's new in 7th Grade. Nice work! |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 2.2 | The collection hits a range of different topics without a unifying thread, so conceptual progression is limited. Errors in a few problems, phrasing, and solutions also compromise coherence. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | David Wees | COHERENT | 2.3 | Some of the tasks offer excellent access to students with a wide degree of understanding but other tasks may be inaccessible to some students. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 3.0 | Tasks provide some evidence of student understanding in a range below selected standards, for example in "get in line" where students may use unit rate reasoning from 6th grade.Students also are asked to reason beyond 7th grade with the task "darts" where they make connections to geometric probabilities. The tasks could be more effective in eliciting evidence of understanding across a wider range with tasks that are more open or that scaffold. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 1.9 | Wide breadth of standards covered (probability to area to expression to arithmetic). But aside from prompts for explanation it didn't seem as though the collection offered depth for students to express their understanding at different levels. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 3.5 | The set offers a good range of problems that require understanding and application of concepts, though a few real-life contexts are forced, or otherwise not fitting, and a number of problems are rather familiar. There's also some variety in the complexity of the tasks, though opportunities for authentic modeling are few. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 3.8 | I found these tasks challenging and highly creative and engaging. I loved the "Proportional or Not" task because of the novel way it introduced so many different representations. I loved Throwing Darts. Great stuff. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | David Wees | RIGOROUS | 1.9 | The tasks vary in rigor. Some tasks only ask students to essentially recall definitions while other tasks are challenging and engaging. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 4.6 | Task are engaging and do balance conceptual understanding, skill and real life application. Collection could be strengthened with tasks that ask students to interpret context more in real life application. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 2.4 | Good balance. Some of the real-life applications seemed like thin disguises for pure procedure, though. eg. The walker who walks at an algebraic rate. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | David Wees | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.1 | The support materials basically only offer support for a solution to the task and offer no suggestions on what to do with alternate student solutions or even what some of those alternate solutions may be. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.3 | Moderately helpful supporting materials, offering a worked example solution in some cases but not much interpretation or anticipation of student errors. In one case, the materials provided didn't match the task. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | Supporting materials do provide some commentary on analyzing student responses, but are limited in addressing the common misconceptions and conceptions and provide little instructional support for targeted instruction. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.2 | For several of the tasks, there are no supporting materials. Most of the supporting materials offer answers and nothing else. Great tasks, but not great supporting material. |
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| Pamela Seda | 48.0 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.8 | Supporting materials occasionally offer scoring guides or possible student responses but are otherwise minimal, mismatched, or missing. Little attention is given to student thinking, potential misunderstandings, or ways to remedy misconceptions. Except in a couple of problems, incorrect student answers receive no hints or guidance (only the correct solutions). |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 2.3 | While most of the items in this collection are appropriate for 7th grade standards, there are some (such as item #7) that is a lower-grade standard. Thus, not all items in this collection are well-aligned to the 7th grade standards. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 1.8 | Much of the material offered here is below grade level. Also, each question comes with a large list of standards which it, allegedly, attends to. Each can't, and doesn't, delve into the listed standards properly. The questions offered could be good bases for clever and good and interesting material, but much deeper mulling and reflection is needed. Many of the problems are rote in feel and nature. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 2.3 | Addressing the Mathematical Practices first, it needs to be noted that they are not a checklist. The MP's are habits of mind we want students to exemplify during the course of problem solving. While a single task may touch lightly on several MP's, it should only be aligned to 1 or 2 with reasoning on the part of the writer on how student work will demonstrate their use of the cited MP's. In example, for task 3, Growing Circles, I'm on board with MP 3 and MP7, but I question the alignment with MP8, MP2, MP4, and MP5 and would need quite a bit of convincing that those MP's are central to the task.
Standard alignment with these tasks was hit and miss. In example, for task 7 Garden Party, standards 7.G.B.4 (which is about circles) and 7.G.B.5 (which is about angles) are cited yet the text of those standards does not align with problems about area of rectangles.
This collection could benefit from a re-examination of all alignments and a reduction of MPs for each task. Additionally, the lack of task commentary directly addressing what aspect of the standard the task is illuminating or how teachers will see evidence of the MP makes assessing the writers intent with many of these task difficult. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 2.6 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 3.2 | Tasks are aligned to the standards and there is some evidence of assessing understanding. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 1.4 | The author should reflect on the problems given and mull on how to use these for interesting, deep, robust material. The basic ideas are good, but all is too simplistic in content and/or presentation and/or providing the means to spot intellectual acuity. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 1.9 | As noted in criterion 1, the lack of correct alignments to the standards and any written commentary by the writer about the coherence between the tasks make judging the coherence of the whole collection difficult with imposing my own person view of the CCSSM, which is something I strive not to do while judging based on written evidence. This collection did have a range of problems, though it leaned a bit heavily on the abstract--something for students in grade 7 to strive for but not something that I would prioritize over more real-world understandings. I am a big fan of structure work, but much of the structure work I saw in this collection was equation/expression manipulation for the sake of it or to solve and not, as stated in 7.EE.B.2, to "understand that rewriting an expression in different forms in a problem context can shed light on the problem and how the quantities in it are related".
Some coherence issues are related to images that don't necessarily go with the problem (the sunflower in task 3) and 'student work samples' that do not match the problem (task 7).
What commentary existed did seem to strive to have teachers look beyond the "tricks" and see the greater connections, but these short paragraphs felt more like sections of text taken from a larger body on university-level math thinking and less like text that would help develop the Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (MKT) that teachers really need for their classroom practice. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 2.3 | Tasks will assess specific understanding and are mostly tied to a specific grade level. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 2.3 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | April Strom | COHERENT | 2.5 | The collection could be strengthened if the items were more connected mathematically. As is, the items suggest more of a list of things for students "to do" rather than a conceptual progression of items that lead to building a deep understanding of the 7th grade standards. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 2.6 | Examples such as those in growing circles, tower building, and baby-sitter are in good places as contexts with some interesting mathematics and also ones that students can hold in their minds/sketch/have familiarity with. Tasks tended to favor conceptual understanding and I wonder how well students in grade 7 who are still developing their abilities to reason abstractly would handle the problems. For exceptional students who enjoy abstract mathematics for the sake of mathematics, this could be a good collection to see what they can do. For the average 7th grader I am left doubtful that the level of abstract rigor in this collection would help a teacher understand what the student knows. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 1.8 | Activity 5: I want the job that pays my $8 for zero hours of work. I can do many zero hours of work in a day.
Of course I know what the author wants to do here in this question, but a discussion about the meaning of zero in a formula could be perfect fodder for a good question for students.
There are wording troubles throughout these questions, some beyond just style issues: What does it mean for two expressions to be equal? The author misses the subtlety of understanding that an algebraic equality is just a sentence, that is neither true nor false. It is not until one asks whether or not there are values that make the sentence true that things get more concrete. Use of the word "equal" versus "equivalent" needs to be handled with care. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 2.5 | Tasks are varied. When adding the pictures to enhance the context, you need to add a description to tie the picture to the problem. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 2.8 | The collection has a few creative items, such as item #3, that seem to have a nice balance of conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. The focus on building structure through the recognition of patterns is great. However, the collection could be strengthened if all items were part of the 7th grade standards and beyond to provide additional rigor. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.6 | Materials did support teacher understanding of the task but were limited in offering next steps for teachers when reviewing evidence of student thinking. The MPs were mentioned but was not developed fully in the instructional supports. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.2 | The items in this collection do not fully incorporate student thinking, particularly student misconceptions as part of the task. This is evident from the choices provided for drop-down answer selections. The supporting materials provided are helpful, but the materials are limited in helping teachers understand the student misconceptions behind the specific items. Incorporating student thinking -- both productive and not -- would strengthen the collection. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.7 | The extra problems included in some tasks were a boon to this collection and something I would like to see in every collection. These, however, are not enough to outweigh the almost total lack of "robust instructional supports that [inform] instruction with justification and precision" or that inform "teachers of opportunities for targeted instruction". |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.9 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Applicant requested name to be removed . | 45.9 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.7 | More care and attention needs to be given here. The author is also held back by the simplicity of the questions themselves. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Dan Meyer | ALIGNED | 2.8 | Interesting set of problems. Tilting pretty heavily towards ratio & proportion but better breadth in the last half. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Karim Ani | ALIGNED | 2.2 | Most of the activities in the collection only included a single question, and most of these questions seemed basic/low-level. As such, the questions did not provide students with a significant opportunity to reveal their thinking or realize the mathematical practices. Furthermore, in some instances the questions did not line up with the intended standard(s). In "Garden," for instance, students use the width of a garden and its area to determine the missing length. The standard requires students to write equations in the form px + q = r. Yet while the sample activity specified in the Common Core involves perimeter, an activity involving area would yield an equation in the form px = r. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Yenche Tioanda | ALIGNED | 0.9 | About half of the items are correctly aligned to the targeted standards. The rest are partly misaligned / incorrectly tagged. Connections to mathematical practice standards are very limited. Task setups don't really lend themselves to eliciting good evidence of student understanding / misunderstanding. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Kelly Stidham | ALIGNED | 1.9 | The first four questions are intended to target the 7.RP standards, but fall short of the grade level expectations. They are more aligned with the 6th grade expectations and bridge to 7th. These could be strengthen by including rate of fractions or by increasing the demand of the students analysis of proportional relationships to include unit rate, equations, graphs etc. While the others do more closely aligned, there are limited opportunities to engage in the revevant math practices beyond SMP2. "Basketball," as an exception, does ask students to critique the correctness of an argument (SMP 3). |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Michael Pershan | ALIGNED | 2.8 | The items were aligned. I judged this fairly generously and standardly. Meaning, unless I saw something that stood out as truly exemplary or deficient I gave an average score on this criterion. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Yenche Tioanda | COHERENT | 1.8 | Half of the items do share a common theme, but not quite a conceptual progression. The entire collection lacks a unifying thread. Not enough scaffolding exist within or across items to show development of concepts. Some problems are not precisely set up or show incorrect solutions, which also compromise coherence. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Dan Meyer | COHERENT | 1.3 | The last half of the collection typically only featured one problem per item, rather than assessing a range of understandings of the targeted concept. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Karim Ani | COHERENT | 1.9 | The activities in the collection seemed unrelated to one another: In one task students are using unit rates to determine the price of frozen yogurt, and in the next task they're subtracting negative integers to find a new temperature. As a whole, the collection was scattered and provided little to no conceptual progression. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Michael Pershan | COHERENT | 3.6 | To assess understanding at different levels of conceptual progressions, there needs to be room for somewhat open responses. Most of the responses called for in this set of tasks are very closed. Still, the questions were sharp and interesting enough that I think some of them would elicit some interesting responses from kids with different degrees of understanding. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Kelly Stidham | COHERENT | 2.2 | Tasks do include demands that connect to 6th grade RP standards and in the Flagpole task, student may engage in using more formal expressions of similar triangles, moving towards 8th grade. The tasks do not fully aid in determining student understanding. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Kelly Stidham | RIGOROUS | 2.6 | Each task is set in a real world context and several are appealing, engaging frames (for example the Road sign artifact). Students are not asked, however, to make decisions about the validity of the models which which they engage or to demonstrate deep understanding of the concepts critical to 7th grade. In general, the overall complexity is not aligned with the demands of the standards. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Yenche Tioanda | RIGOROUS | 2.2 | Most problems involve an applied context and there are a few original ideas, but there's limited evidence of attention to conceptual understanding (most questions require single-number responses). A couple of interesting real-world contexts are offered but not precisely or carefully framed. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Michael Pershan | RIGOROUS | 4.0 | I thought a lot of these tasks were great, interesting, and clearly connected to the real-world. The remote control car task made me smile -- what a cool question! Ditto for Road Rates and Basketball. Other tasks shone less brightly (e.g. Soccer Teams seemed fairly conventional) but so many of your tasks were clever and cool. Nicely done! |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Dan Meyer | RIGOROUS | 4.7 | The most engaging & creative set I've seen so far. Great use of media to provoke mathematical thought. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Karim Ani | RIGOROUS | 3.0 | The author included interesting contexts for problems, and ones likely to engage students. These included remote control cars, basketball, and musical instruments. However, the questions themselves were often rote, unmotivated, and unlikely to engage students in a meaningful way. While the author made an admirable attempt to incoporate real-world activities, at times they felt forced. For instance, the basketball activity had a student grab a basketball and say to his friends, "The cube around this ball would take up 900 cubic inches of air." In real life, though, would anyone actually say this? |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Michael Pershan | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.2 | Some of the tasks didn't even have supporting materials, and the supporting materials that were provided didn't really get into misconceptions or any sort of explanation that would be helpful. Everything else about your collection of tasks was strong, but this was a weakness. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Yenche Tioanda | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.6 | Except for minimal commentary in one item, supporting materials are essentially absent from the set. Many solutions also do not post correctly. Item profile information is also skeletal. No guidance (only the correct solution) is offered if students answer incorrectly. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Kelly Stidham | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.7 | There is some commentary on scoring but there is very little supporting material to aid in teacher's identifying misconceptions, interpreting student responses, or adjusting instruction. Tasks would provide some evidence of student thinking. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Dan Meyer | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.8 | No teacher support materials. Many of the assessment items were straightforward but some could have used interpretation and teacher support. |
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| Glen Lewis | 41.8 | Karim Ani | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.6 | Of the ten activities in the collection, only one included any supporting materials whatsoever. For this activity ("Basketball"), the supporting materials did little more than specify the correct answer but did not address potential student misconceptions or provide the teacher guidance on how to best teach the task. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Ashli Black | ALIGNED | 2.1 | I have confusion over the alignment on the majority of the tasks in this collection. Under 'profile information', there is a standard under the ccss tag and then there is also the text of a standard in the title position that, more often then not, does not match the standard listed in the tag. Sometimes the task aligns to the tag, sometimes to the task in the title. If teaching notes existed on what aspect of the standard the task was addressing (as no task can fully address a standard) then I would know which alignment was meant but as it stands it appears that this collection is not representative of the listed standards.
There is no reference in this collection to the mathematical practices. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Darren Burris | ALIGNED | 1.2 | Items do connect to targeted standards, but in an narrow way. The depth of the standards and how they reside within the cluster to develop bigger ideas is not represented in this collection of items. The targeting of specific aspects of standards is not paired with the development of particular mathematical practices. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Robin Hill | ALIGNED | 2.0 | Items did not provide opportunities for students to demonstrate depth of understanding. Intent of standards not always met. Limited opportunities for students to demonstrate the SMP. Many missed opportunities - repeated reasoning and seeing structure. The items are for the most part narrowly focused on answer getting. There is a nice attempt to target a variety of standards. Traditional set of tasks without directly getting to the SMPs |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Nora Ramirez | ALIGNED | 2.1 | Standards noted were often not correct. There was no opportunity for students to engage in mathematical practices. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 2.0 | The set of problems presented, alas, are far too curt to be of significant help in encouraging robust and interesting student thinking. Almost all are just a task to find the numerical answer to a quick "what" question and offer no complexity or layers of thought. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Nora Ramirez | COHERENT | 1.9 | A progression was not evident. There was little attempt to link topics in the collection. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Ashli Black | COHERENT | 2.7 | Tasks span a range of domains and the focus on RP, as part of the major work of grade 7, is nice to see. I'd like to see more "complementary topics" worked into the RP and EE work instead of treating them separately (as with task 7). Statistics and Geometry blend well with RP and EE work.
With regards to the level of the problems, range seems to be near the middle with tasks like 1 and 2 dealing with some fundamental grade 6/7 work. Given the nature of the problems and the lack of short response which is where student understanding truly surfaces, I wonder how will this collection would do at assessing actual student understanding. Tasks 8 and 9, as they are written, lack clarity. I had to read task 8 many times to figure out what was actually being asked. in task 9 the phrasing of the problem makes it seem as though the 8 already downloaded songs are irrelevant. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Darren Burris | COHERENT | 1.1 | The narrow development of the items to elicit specific, primarily procedural, knowledge of the standards work against any significant development of coherence. The narrow focus as well as limited use of the item development tool does not allow items to reach back to related below grade level content or extended items to above grade level content. In addition, the items do not work to create coherence among the work of the grade and connect related topics within the grade level. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 1.5 | Again, because each question is so short and essentially involves just a numerical calculation there is little complexity or interest in the tasks. Each is very pointed and so the issue of "width of assessing" does not really apply. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Robin Hill | COHERENT | 1.7 | Assessing what students understand is limited for the most part to answer getting and not demonstration of reasoning and problem solving. Would like to see more opportunities for students - Some tasks were loosely aligned to the full intent of the chosen standard. Opportunities were missed with only focusing on one part of the standard and not making connections. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 2.0 | I won't repeat myself again, but add here that there are also some wording problems here and there in the questions. For example, in question 6, are cherries $1.99 each? Question 8 is quite troubled in its presentation (and why wouldn't you just look at where the spike of umbrella is when you have it on the table to locate the center?), Question 9 needs some clarification on timing (starting now, since the 8 songs were downloaded or since before the 8 songs were downloaded?). Some of the questions are also too elementary. I do think the author could use each of the these questions as a base for a series of interesting and layered tasks - to mull on each for a good few hours and expand to something deep and exciting. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Robin Hill | RIGOROUS | 2.7 | This collection had some items with good starts but just did not follow through with being appealing and allowing students to make connections - it was much more about answer getting. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Ashli Black | RIGOROUS | 2.6 | Due to the similar formats of the problems, I do not consider it 'creative'. The majority of the problems are 'classics' (growth, tax, t-shirt sales), and for the most part are things students can visualize, which I see as a positive. The range of contexts with no relation from one task to the next has me worried for English language learners and Special education students as students have shown having a 'super context' through a chapter or large problem set is very helpful for those populations. Something to consider.
To echo a comment from the previous criterion, the lack of short response questions or questions asking students to critique the reasoning of others limits the collection from having "an appropriate balance" of problem types. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Nora Ramirez | RIGOROUS | 1.7 | Even though several items were related to real life they were algorithmic in nature. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Darren Burris | RIGOROUS | 1.9 | The majority of items are developed from traditional ideas and do not require a deep understanding of the conceptual understandings articulated in the standards. The majority of the items in the calculation are focused on calculated outputs that do not assess deep conceptual understanding of the targeted standards. The collection does move across a broad range of contexts requiring students to move comfortably from context to context in order to solve each item. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Darren Burris | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.6 | Collection offers possible solutions, but little instruction support on the use of the item, possible misconceptions, etc. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Nora Ramirez | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.1 | The supportive materials were merely calculations and answers. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.1 | No meta-commentary offered. All quick presentations to the numerical task at hand. If the author had more time and could mull on each question for a good while, I feel there could be good material to be developed here. |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Robin Hill | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.7 | This collection only contained the answer key - and no instructional supports other than at times providing multiple ways to reach solution (correct answer) |
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| Rocio Cress | 34.1 | Ashli Black | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.4 | This collection offered no ideas on student misconceptions and solutions were limited to one possibility. Given the lack of supporting materials beyond simple answer keys showing only one solution path, I cannot score anything but a 0 for this criterion. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Fawn Nguyen | ALIGNED | 1.1 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Mona Toncheff | ALIGNED | 0.9 | Most are not relevant to 7th grade standards and there is no evidence of the MPS. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Max Ray-Riek | ALIGNED | 1.3 | This is a fascinating collection as a commentary on the Common Core progression around number and quantity; however it does not represent targeted 7th grade standards or help me get a sense of how my students understand addition and subtraction, fractions, etc. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | April Strom | ALIGNED | 1.2 | The items in this collection do not align with the CCSSM. In fact, there are really no items in this collection that connect to 7th grade standards. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | James Tanton | ALIGNED | 3.1 | This score represents neither approval or disapproval of the strategy being employed by the author in submitting this content. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Mona Toncheff | COHERENT | 0.6 | I am not sure what this collection actually assesses. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Max Ray-Riek | COHERENT | 1.2 | Again, the collection is fascinating but it does not represent a coherent progression or even counter-progression, rather it is a commentary on the standards and progressions. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | James Tanton | COHERENT | 2.8 | This score represents neither approval or disapproval of the strategy being employed by the author in submitting this content. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Fawn Nguyen | COHERENT | 0.9 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | April Strom | COHERENT | 0.9 | There is no conceptual progression provided in these items. These items are not coherent. I'm unclear as to the purpose of these items. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | James Tanton | RIGOROUS | 3.5 | This score represents neither approval or disapproval of the strategy being employed by the author in submitting this content. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Mona Toncheff | RIGOROUS | 0.9 | This collection is not engaging and is not appropriate for 7th grade. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Max Ray-Riek | RIGOROUS | 2.1 | There was no attempt to connect to real-life tasks, however the collection was appealing and original. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | April Strom | RIGOROUS | 1.2 | Unfortunately, there is nothing in this collection that is engaging or creative. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Fawn Nguyen | RIGOROUS | 1.6 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Mona Toncheff | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.5 | There is not feedback provided to the students and the materials are unclear |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Max Ray-Riek | INSTRUCTIVE | 1.6 | Supporting materials were difficult to find and read as they were mostly embedded in the answer checks or in fields that only showed limited characters. However, they were very thoughtful and would be useful for teachers presented in a more clear, legible format with tasks designed to illustrate student thinking around the topics they address. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | April Strom | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.1 | Again, due to the nature of the items in this collection, there is no instructional benefit from these items. The support materials are superfluous. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | James Tanton | INSTRUCTIVE | 2.7 | This score represents neither approval or disapproval of the strategy being employed by the author in submitting this content. |
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| Fred Gustavson | 28.7 | Fawn Nguyen | INSTRUCTIVE | 0.5 | Please see comments provided in a separate Word document. |