At the end of every Stats Medic lesson, there is a Check Your Understanding (CYU) problem. The intention here is to give students a chance to practice their learning in a new context and in a more formal way than they did in the activity. The best part about the CYU is that it is so flexible in how you might use it. Here are some suggestions:
In Class
In the activity, students use informal reasoning and calculations to work their way through the questions. During the debrief of the activity, the teacher formalizes the learning by providing new vocabulary or new formulas to match the student work. The Check Your Understanding gives students a chance to try out this new formal learning in a context that is different than the one in the activity.
When doing this in class, you have to decide whether students should work on it in their groups or individually. We tend to make this decision based on our confidence in the students' understanding of the content from the lesson. If we feel that almost all of our students can be successful on their own, we have them do it individually. If we feel that some of our students will struggle, we prefer that they have the support of the other students in their group.
Exit Ticket
The Check Your Understanding can also be used as a formative check to see how students are doing. Students can hand in their work for the teacher to review before the next class period, or students can raise their hand once complete and then have the teacher check in with immediate feedback.
Homework
Sometimes the lessons go long and there might not be class time for the Check Your Understanding problem. In this case, it would be very reasonable to assign this as part of their homework. Students could even check their answers by watching the last part of the lesson videos.
Warm-up for Tomorrow
Another option is to save the Check Your Understanding problem for the next day, to be used as a warm-up. This way, your class period starts with a quick summary of the learning from the previous day before moving on to a new lesson. This strategy is particularly effective when the previous day's learning is essential to the new learning for that day (which happens often!)
