Teaching Geometry - Check in quiz

In this unit, first time with me teaching it, I felt like we were doing so much, so fast.  I didn't know what the students were actually digesting and processing.  I felt it was time to check in. I told the students the day before that they were going to take a mini - quiz.  They were to get 20 minutes.  I ended up giving them 25 minutes.  It was on Geometric Mean, Pythagorean Theorem, Special Right Triangles, and Right Triangle trig - so ALL right triangle stuff - Law of Sines and Cosines would not be on it.

The quiz was formative - would be collected, corrected, but not graded.  Here is the quiz.

The quiz did not go so well.  I decided to ask the students to identify what type of problem each one was.  They really struggled with that.  And, they used the Law of Sines.  They love it and they are good at it, but I stressed it is for non-right triangles.  I told them on the real quiz I would take one point off if they used Law of Sines and did Sine of 90.  They are showing me that they don't understand when to use right triangle trig.

Results: Geo mean doing Pythagorean:



Results: Thinking Right Triangle Trig is special right triangles but then doing Law of Sines.




Results: Not wrong, but I always want them to answer as simplified square root, exact answers, plus not using Geometric Mean to solve:



Results:  This student knew it was special right triangle but then used right triangle trig.