Science:MER/Solutions

Solutions to exam questions constitute the main part of the content this wiki offers to students (for the moment at least). Since our mission is to support student learning, we want to strive for solutions which encourage students to learn and think deeply of their work and the concepts involved with calculus and avoid promoting rote learning and procedural thinking as much as possible.

Criteria for good solutions

A good solution should be:

• Simple given the concepts and tools that are available to a typical student.
• Clearly highlight the reasoning that is involved in making decisions when solving a problem.
• Spend some time discussing how word problems are modelled. This element is critical for students and constitute one of their biggest weaknesses. As such, extra care should be taken to explain and guide students through that step while explaining alternate and equivalent choices which would also work.

I added a solution, how do I flag it for review?

When there are more than one solution present, it is worth adding in the discussion page a mention of which solution should be reviewed.

Quality control - reviewing a solution?

Once a solution has been flagged for review (with a RS flag), a contributor who has NOT worked on that solution can review its content. There are two possible outcomes of the review:

• Bad: for a solution that contains mistakes, typos or formatting errors OR for a solution that doesn't support well student learning (see the criteria for good solutions above). In this case, the reviewer has two choices:
  • make some modifications to the solution and leave the RS flag to invite another contributor to review the new work;
  • OR leave the work as is and change the RS flag into a QBS flag to signal the problem to other contributors. In this case, the reviewer is asked to write the reasons for the bad flag in the discussion page to justify and inform other contributors of his decision and the work that needs to be done.
• Good: for a solution that is correct, well formatted AND support student learning. In this case, the reviewer change the RS flag into a QGS flag.

As with hints, the third possible outcome is that the reviewer would like to see an additional solution. The reviewer can either write the additional solution and flag for review (see above) or make sure that the Question page has an active CS flag and explain what kind of hint you are looking for in the discussion page.