Junior Exams

Our Year 9's did their very first high school exam on Tuesday, 19 June starting with mathematics.

I tried to create a rich task with a meaningful context covering the Number, Measurement and Probability strands of the NZ curriculum so that learners would actively engage with the context and also to set them up for contextual learning when they reach the senior school and do NCEA exams as we have moved away from teaching skills in isolation. Not only did learners have to show detailed evidence as to how they solved questions but they also had to search online to complement already-existing content; that encouraged active interaction with the task.



Our context was about Steven Adams gifting them 4 tickets to the NZ Breakers basketball game at Spark Arena. Measurement skills included
checking online for train times and fares
converting scale diagram measurements of the basketball court
finding perimeter and area of parts of the basketball court
finding costs of the train fare if discounts were given on the day (a good way to integrate between maths strands as this was evidence of Number)

Carls Junior and Sky City Hotel are sponsors of the NZ Breakers basketball team so we used the former context for our Probability strand where learners had to look online for menus and then find the probability of certain Carls Junior combinations and the latter context was used for the Number strand. Learners had to check online for hotel and dinner prices for them, a friend and 2 adults and then work out the total cost of the prize that they had won in NZ dollars. We incorporated ratio by having them convert the total cost from NZ dollars into US dollars as Steven Adams is based in the States and is paid in that currency.

I noticed these comment from 2 of my learner's exam papers....

Thank you Mrs Dunn for creating this awesome Exam paper for us!! it was really fun. Sorry if i got some questions wrong . :)

This test was difficult, I now know what to focus on and will try harder next time

I used the HIGHLIGHT feature on teacher dashboard to see if learners were on task and the DRAFTBACK feature from the chrome webstore to see how long learners were engaged during the 2-hour exam slot and the context certainly kept learners engaged.