Formative Assessment: Matrices

Gaining understanding of a Markov chain during yesterday's class may have been a difficult task for some students. I will give students about 5 minutes to go through the homework assignment with their table groups and I will circulate around the class to see if there are any pressing concerns.

After that, I will usually open up the floor for any questions about matrices before our quiz. Usually students will want some clarification about matrix multiplication and how you find the value of each entry. My students also want some more information about communication matrices and how interpret their results.

If no one in the class has any questions, here are some that I may pose to the class before they take their quiz.

1. Can you add any two matrices together? Multiply?
2. What is a communication matrix? What can it tell you?
3. What happens when you raise a communication matrix to a power? What can it tell you?
4. What would be a context where we would subtract two matrices? Add two matrices? Multiply two matrices?

Today's quiz is going to give you an idea of how well students understand the concepts of matrices before we move on to systems of equations and how those relate to matrices. This is a good stopping point to assess your students and to intervene with some if it is necessary. Some sample questions are given in this document.

I allow students to use graphing calculators on this quiz - but you can see from some of the questions that the focus is on interpreting and explication. I discuss more in the video below.