Last year, I created a prototype of a tool that takes Google Documents linked from a spreadsheet and merges them together. During the summer, Frandy and Erik from our Data and Systems team along with some other members of the Cloudlab team at New Visions for Public Schools upgraded the tool into a Google Sheets Add-on. We gave it the name Quiz Banker.

 

The goal of this work was to take a repetitive task that almost all NY State public school math teachers do, which is to merge and typeset items from Regents exams, and greatly reduce how long this task takes, thus saving teachers time to do other more important tasks. We can easily typeset Regents questions centrally at a fairly low cost, and then a tool like Quiz Banker makes it easier for teachers to work with those typeset questions.

During the summer we asked teachers how long it would normally take them to take all of the Regents questions associated with a particular domain of mathematics and typeset them into the same document. Answers from teachers ranged from 5 minutes to 8 hours with most teachers estimating about an hour. When we demoed Quiz Banker, it took 2 minutes to accomplish this task, including the time spent installing the add-on.

During the summer suggestion I told teachers, “If it used to take you 40 minutes to create a quiz and now it takes 2 minutes, use those 38 minutes you saved to make sure that quiz assesses what you want it to assess.” As Patrick Honner notes frequently on his blog, not every Regents question is of equal quality.

Having a question typeset also means you can easily modify a multiple choice question into a more open-ended question, modify the language of a question to get a slightly different mathematical idea, or just increase the font-size so that students with differences in visual processing are able to read the question.

QuizBanker also includes meta-data like what Common Core Domain, Cluster, and Standard to which each question is aligned as well as alignment to the Units and Big Ideas in the New Visions’ Math Curriculum. This further reduces how long it takes teachers to aggregate those questions usefully.

Quickly filtering for question type

 

More broadly I believe that if teachers are going to work on changing their teaching, this takes time, but time is a fixed quantity. The cheapest way to give teachers more time to work on improving their teaching is to take repetitive and time-consuming tasks they do and change the amount of time spent on these tasks either by eliminating those tasks altogether or by reducing how long the task takes to do.

What other tasks do you see math teachers doing frequently that could save time if there was a tool that made that task easier and faster to do?