Teach 180: Learning More About Card Sorts (Day 20)

Today we did a card sort activity in Calculus to review some basic parent functions and to remind students about creating "offspring" by using basic transformations of parent functions.  As a teacher, what did I learn from today's activity?

1) The teacher dashboard can be displayed to give feedback to students.  Students could see if their matches were correct and fix their errors.  This also allowed me to touch base quickly with the few pairs that were struggling.  Correct matches are in green and incorrect matches are in red.  It was interesting to note on the second slide that not all students used the same strategy, but there were two or three main strategies.

2) The end of activity "How did you do?" shows me that I need to circle back to one specific pair of students tomorrow.  But it also shows me that even though all students completed most of the activity correctly, they admitted to not easily remembering all of the parent functions.  This is something I need to keep in mind when I do anything with students that is supposedly review.  Review and recall does not come as easily for some students.

3) The "offsprings" of a vertical shift down 5 units or a horizontal shift right 5 units were reversed by some students. This will be something I need to pay extra close attention to in future units.