Some of my students get really freaked out by the kinds of questions that are asked on the regents exams. As I mentioned earlier, they expect the questions to be familiar and frequently I hear things like, "we never learned that," or words to that effect. They work themselves into a state of panic when the answer isn't immediately obvious but rather requires some thinking and problem solving process to figure out. I try to alleviate their stress by doing practice questions and looking at strategies, but every time I give them a test with regents questions on it, they go through the same conniptions. In they end, they don't do as badly as they think they did, in part due to the regents curve that I apply to those types of tests, and in part because they don't realize that they can actually figure out the answers if they don't give up so easily.
So, today I'm having them produce regents question analysis posters, as a review of both the process of figuring out the answer and as a review of some of the content covered by the most recent test I gave (cells/cell processes). Here's a model of what they will produce on paper ( I did it on powerpoint, which you can download.) I kept the explanations simple and short, so don't get nitpicky about the details.
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