How my PreCalculus students prepare for Unit Tests

Students are terrible at studying for math. Well, most of them are. I ask them - how did you study? and pretty much the response you get is "I looked over my notes". Arrggghhh.  In my mind, to study for me you have to work through problems. A bunch of problems. In all areas that have been studied. And for a big unit test, it should be a lot of problems and take a good long while to study thoroughly.

My solution to this problem - I have my students make a study guide. They have to find problems (from homework, quizzes, classwork, etc) for each topic. I give them a detailed outline of what they need to do. they get some time in class to do this. And then must finish it at home.

The only new bit I added this year was to have them do the study guide in their interactive student notebooks. I figured, why not. Last year was my first year doing these notebooks in PreCalculus and we only used about half our composition notebook over the year. So we have extra pages. This way their study guide is all together with their reference notes in their ISN. The complete package so to speak.

I do collect the study guide on the day of the test. And they get a completion score (but they have to provide examples that are appropriate for the each topic, wrong type of example=no credit on that topic). It's a participation grade. I don't do separate participation grades for my students. Their participation score is basically the study guides and any graded classwork that I collect. I also tell them that homework is participation.

This year since I had them put their study guides in their ISN I did a "sample" study guide in my ISN. I do not post this sample (they could just copy my problems). But I have it available in my classroom for students to see what the set up would look like for this study guide.

Here are my filled in ISN pages.

and here are my instructions for students about the study guide for unit 1.