Friday, April 26, 2013

Reverse Your Questions: Energizing Teaching Tools

 

Pick a question that you asked today in class.  Try to reverse the question.  Make the answer the question and the question the answer.  You might notice the question might be a lot more open ended?  Is it a higher level question than your original?    So next time you are making a worksheet, reverse a few of your questions and mix them in along side some of your original type questions.  Then see if your worksheet has a better mix of conceptual and procedural questions.  

Examples
Geometry:  Original Question:  What is the area of this parallelogram given the height is 4 cm and the base is 10 cm?  Reversed Question:  Find the base and height of a parallelogram given the area is 40 square cm.

Algebra:  Original Question:  Solve this equation   5x + 10 = 30  Reversed Question:  Find a two step equation that has a solution of  x = 4.

Precalculus:  Original Question:  What is sin (30 degrees)?  Reversed Question:  Sin of what degree value(s)  give an answer of .5?

PLEASE COMMENT WITH YOUR OWN IDEAS.

The page above is out of the book called "Engaging Teaching Tools"  More information is located at the  the blog post How to Measure Student Engagement?



1 comment:

Unknown said...

What a great idea! Reverse the question. Using the examples you listed in your post, it seems easier to come up with the question when given the solution.