Example High School Mathematics Department

Assessment Task 1:
Making Maths Unforgettable
Some things you need to know about the learning of mathematics in school and beyond:
 During every year of high school you will spend about 150 hours in a classroom with
your mathematics teacher and many hours doing homework.
 You will learn a huge number of new things every year and you will revise some
things you learnt before (and shortly afterwards you will forget some of them).
 The things you learnt last year and the year before will be needed for the things you
learn from now until the end of school and possibly beyond. For example, you may
already know that the angle sum of a triangle is 180 degrees. You need to hold onto
that fact and then add dozens more facts to your ‘geometry wall’ in the coming years.
 Learning maths is like building a brick wall. You need to make sure that the
foundations are strong so that the whole wall stays strong.
 Some of the things you will learn in high school maths are somewhat forgettable.

So, this assessment task is designed to help you summarise your knowledge and skills that
contribute to Fluency, so that you can focus on the most important aspects of mathematics:

 Understanding
 Communication and Reasoning
 Problem-Solving

Our goal:
By the time you reach Year 12 you will have a collection of really helpful summaries of
everything you have learnt. These will be called learning logs. They will be saved in a place
where you can find them easily (a paper copy AND a digital copy that lives in the clouds).

The good news:

 Sometimes we are going to allow you to use these summaries during tests and
examinations.
 Your teacher is going to collect them and judge them and the marks will count
towards the results which go on your reports (30% of your assessment)

The plan:
At the end of every topic, you will be given a blank sheet of A4 paper. You are welcome to
use both sides to write down things that you have learnt that will probably be useful in the
future but may be forgotten. You will be permitted to compare yours with other students, but
yours must be written in your own hand-writing. You can also show them to your teacher.
Typing mathematical symbols and diagrams is slow and tedious, so don’t type them. When
you have finished you will scan it or take a photo of it and keep it in a sensible digital place.

Please trust us!

This may seem like a chore now, but one day these learning logs will be very helpful.

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 Example High School Mathematics Department

Some examples of things you might write on your learning logs. We suggest you use a
different colour for each of these.

Procedures (algorithms) you have learnt, such as:

 How to add fractions with different denominators
 How to convert a fraction to a decimal
 How to divide a quantity in a ratio
 How to solve a quadratic equation

Key words, phrases, terminology and definitions, such as:

 The definition of a rhombus
 The properties of a rhombus
 The difference between discrete data and categorical data

Important theorems, facts, figures, diagrams and graphs, such as:

 The product of two negative numbers is always positive
 The graph of the straight line
 Vertically opposite angles are equal.
 A triangle with sides of 3, 4 and 5 is right-angled.
So is 5, 12, 13.

Every formula you ever meet, such as:

 The formula for the area of a circle
 The formula for compound interest
 The quadratic formula

How to press the buttons on your calculator to make things happen, such as:
 How to clear data, enter data and calculate the mean
 How to convert decimals to fractions
 How to use the memory

Examples, with solutions, of important questions and commonly-asked problems

that you did in class or for homework, especially things that are similar but
different, such as:
 12% of 60
 12 as a percentage of 60
 12% of a number is 60. What is the number?

With the wisdom of hindsight, anything that you needed during a test and was
NOT on your learning log, because you might need it next time.

In short:
 If you think it is important
 If you think you might need it later on
 If you think you are going to forget it
Put it on your learning log!
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