Using Your Question Bank

Open the  Acrobat Catalog Index.

A Search window opens.  Since I am looking for sequence questions I will type ‘nth term’.

Click Search.

Open a file by clicking on it, for example “ nth term of a different sequence is 4n – 2.”

By clicking on a few more search results you can quickly put together a quiz or test on the topic.

Create Your Own Question Bank

If you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional you can create your own question bank from past year papers.  The bank you will create is 'bare-bones'.  It does not link to curriculum focus, level of difficulty,  answer keys or examiner reports.  With all those negatives, why bother? Mainly because the question bank itself runs on the free Adobe Acrobat.

1) Create a folder and copy all the PDFs you want to index to the folder.

2) Open Adobe Acrobat Professional.

3) Choose Advanced > Catalog....

4) Click New Index...

In Index Title, give your index file a name.
In Index Description, type a few words about the type of index.
Then browse for folders (Any folder nested under an included folder will also be indexed.)

Click OK.  you will be prompted to build.

Click Build, and specify the location for the index file. Click Save.  When complete you will see index build successful.

Acrobat Professional has created a file with a .pdx extension and a support folder, with file(s) with .idx extensions. The IDX files contain the index entries. These files are available to any user who wants to search the index.  

Note:
The procedure may vary slightly in a different version of Adobe Acrobat Professional.

Making Sense of Variables

Some of us have no trouble with writing expressions or equations for word problems.  But we are in the minority.  Earlier today I was reading from a rather old (1980s) study on this very difficulty.  One might have hoped that in the 30 plus years since then, a pedagogical solution to the problem would have been found, but any algebra teacher can tell you that making sense of word problems remains traumatic for many children.

The following question (taken from Translation difficulties in Learning Mathematics, American Mathematical Monthly, v88 n4 p286-90 Apr 1981) was given to 47 (non-science) algebra students and 150 calculus students.

Write an equation for the statement, ‘There are six times as many students as professors at this university.’ Use S for the number of students and P for the number of professors. 

I was not surprised that more than half (57%) of the algebra students got this question wrong. But a large minority (37%) of the calculus students also had an incorrect answer.   According to the authors, the most common mistake was 6S = P.  When asked to explain their thinking, some students drew a picture like this:

The mathematics teacher might be frustrated that the requirement (or warning? or advice?) “Use S for the number of students…” was not followed.   Otherwise, the drawing should look like this:

 

The number of students = 6.

The number of professors   = 1

Obviously, 6 ≠1.  However,

Replace “The number of students” with S and “The number of professors” with P to obtain:

Make ‘S’ the subject of the equation by multiplying both sides by P.

Finally, obtain, S = 6P. 

Is this too much work for something that’s obvious? Perhaps the joke is on us:

The professor is giving a lecture and has made an assertion as part of his presentation. A student, not understanding the basis for the assertion asks why it is true. The professor responds that "It is obvious." Then the professor steps back, stares at the board and ponders for several minutes. Then he turns and walks out of the lecture hall. He is absent for a fairly long time  … Finally, just before the class is scheduled to end the professor reappears, and announces "Yes, it is obvious."

http://www.thescienceforum.com/mathematics/10833-math-joke.html