Math Modelling Experience

I just want to share my math modelling experience that I had with contract school. Schools usually don't use the term 'modelling' but 'performance task'. Typically, schools integrate real world contexts into performance tasks. I rememeber doing one performance task with the secondary one students on floor tiling. Given a fixed floor area and 2 different types of tiles of different prices, the students were told to tile the floor based on a few criteria: optimum cost, least tiles wasted and least cutting of tiles involved. This kind of task really set the students thinking and at the end of the day, there is no fixed solution. But however, before the students even start to attempt the task, they will ask questions like 'is this counted in the examination?' and blah blah blah. I feel that in order to really engage the students' thinking in math modelling, the tone must first be set right; if not, you will have students giving superficial solutions, which you know they have not given much thought to it.

Another issue that arises is the evalution process, aka, rubrics. Does the rubric really provide the best solution? How do we assess the students? If the students fail in the performance task, does it mean that their ability is low? How do we train the students in mathematical modelling? These questions really pose some challenges in setting a performance task.

Well, I just feel that it may even take ages to come up with a good performance task with rubric that allows the teacher to assess the students' learning accordingly.

Group F