25 percent

The end of the 1st quarter of the school year is upon us. My AP students are feeling it most acutely- some have several targets they haven't achieved proficiency on yet. They're signing up for re-assessments, and it looks like it's going to be a very busy week. The limit is one re-assessment a day, which can contain up to two targets. They have to submit their requests via my google docs form at least 24 hours in advance, which makes this whole she-bang reasonable. One particularly organized student submitted 3 different requests for next week, which was stunning at first, but at least I had the weekend to prepare.

People keep asking what I learned while I was in Argentina. They want to know what techniques I learned or what tricks the teachers shared with me. I feel like it's a let-down to say this, but when I think back about it, what I learned had more to do with how my actions can affect the class. I realize now that I'd become complacent, not in my methods or what I did, but in my expectations of students. In Argentina I saw students that were on a similar level as my own who were being pushed harder and challenged to go beyond what my own students were tackling. I realized that the limiting factor in my teaching wasn't my students' capabilities or work ethics, but rather my own ideas of what they could do.

So this year I've tried to push further. Not in a mean tortuous way, but in a hey-you-are-more-capable-than-you-think-and-I-know-you-can-do-this sort of way. One example was pretty minor, but it seems to be helping the students. When they write lab reports I've always had them include trend lines on their graphs. This year I've gone further- they need to modify the generic y=blabla*x + blerp equations to fit their own variables. For example, if they are changing air volume in a balloon and then measuring its airtime, the resulting equation should be something like time = (blabla seconds/pumps)*volume+blerp seconds. This seems to help reinforce that the equations are supposed to be modelling something physical; it's been easier to get them to make the connection between the equation of their equations and real world behavior at really big or really small values. This isn't anything new... I've expected my students to think about this type of stuff. It's just that few of them have. The relatively simple change in my expectations for their equations has produced the reflective behavior I wanted, though I didn't expect this to happen.

My students always choose their own lab topics and design their own experiments. This year we've seem some really neat stuff. One group chose to make a marshmallow gun, which is pretty neat. The cool thing is that they've gone down a different road than other groups who have tackled this topic in previous years. They've changed barrel length a little bit, but the big leap they made was to modify the scale of the gun. The original design was for mini-marshmallows, but they made new models to shoot regular-sized marshmallows and jumbo marshmallows. The air source they're using is still the same, so this led to an interesting discussion about scaling. Another neat thing was that the jumbo-sized marshmallows didn't fit perfectly in the barrel, so we had to wrap them in some wadding a la revolutionary war! Lots of layers to this one, but it's just one experiment out of roughly 20 that are running right now.

shopvac powered jumbo marshmallow gun

Another new wrinkle with my lab program is the reports themselves. I've used the same format for reports for the past 6 years with only minor changes. Each partner writes their own report, but they use different formats. One writes a technical report complete with abstract, and the other writes a popular report in a two-column format. I borrowed this technique from Larry Hiller in Buffalo, and I like it. Not just because it makes cheating much much harder, but also because it gets the students to think about their audiences. They can share graphs, tables, figures, etc., but the rest of the writing is their own. Ok, enough suspense (or rambling? hard to tell). The new wrinkle is that once students master the reports, they only have to submit a 1-page informal write-up that is graded on a sufficient/insufficient basis. The bar I set this year was a 90% on a formal report. I think I would make it >90% for future years, and maybe make them master both styles before they can switch to the informal reports. My students from last year who wrote ~8 formal reports in my course are slightly peeved, and rightfully so. I explained that I try to change things for the better each year, and that this is an experiment of sorts. I changed the AP C Physics course drastically this year, and I think it's way better than it used to be. But they don't have anything to compare it to, so they don't know how lucky they are. Speaking of which, this week they'll be completing a reflective activity about their performance thus far in my course. Anyone have any favorite questions they use to get kids thinking about their own work and efforts?

I have a few AP students who aren't nearly proficient on quite a few targets. I'm a little worried, but fingers are crossed that they'll pull it together before the end of the week. Nearly 25% of the year has passed, vacation season on the horizon... gotta make hay while the sun is shining!

Flaws, Solutions, and Ruminations

Wow, it has been way too long. I've been buried in work (mostly of my own creation), and this is the first time I've had a chance to come up for air. The other night I was leaving feedback for my students after their weekly assessment in class and I realized I was writing a lot. Mayhaps too much. Here is one entry:

Your graph of the backyard pool problem was pretty good. it put you in the right ballpark, but not quite close enough (the actual solution was 9 m). It was a reasonable graph, but you didn't show an algebraic solution to the problem, so I can't really tell how you're doing on this target. I get the sensation that the issue had to do with not having the equation you needed.... we need to be really comfortable with these equations. not just getting licensed to use them once, but knowing them well enough to be able to come up with them whenever we need them (or pull them out of our memories). If it was something else (like maybe the problem was intimidating), then I'd suggest some practice. Come see me sometime and we can chat about it.

The student who received this had an interesting issue- he had recently gotten a new iPhone and for some reason it was sending his texts and emails to his parents' computer rather than to his new phone (not sure how this happened). Well, mom got the updates from the BlueHarvest website saying that new comments were posted for him, and was astonished by the amount of text. I think that the word he used was actually "disturbed." Not sure if it's over the top or not, but it seems to have been a one-time thing, that particular night I had enough time to be able to geek out and write a ton, but that isn't normally the case.

So I'm still using SBG with my AP class. Some get it, others do not. One student said she definitely needs to come in for extra credit because she hasn't mastered many standards. I gave her a funny look, and this led to a new round of discussion regarding how I will calculate their grade at the end of the marking period. She wondered if getting less than mastery still earned her points on a target (it doesn't by the way, but it shows progress in the right direction). For the record, this is a conversation we've had before, but it had new urgency since it's about 2.5 weeks away. We also had a long discussion about what it means to be proficient in a skill and what should happen if they have an off day and don't do well on an assessment. I had been removing their proficiency if they bombed a standard on a new assessment that they'd already mastered- the point if it is to have the skills mastered, which means all the time, right? They argued that sometimes problems can be intimidating and hard to start. We went back and forth, their argument being that a single bad day shouldn't be cause for a drop in proficiency- maybe it should take two poor showings to drop back below proficiency. I'm not sure about this, but if we went to the two strikes model then I think I should add a caveat that if they do drop, they have to re-assess post-haste.

The whole discussion came up because there was a problem on an assessment I wrote that went something like:
Gwen and her little sister Natalia are hanging out in the back yard. It’s a hot day and they decide to race to the pool. Gwen decides that since Natalia is younger, she deserves a head start of 5 meters. After they count down “3, 2, 1, go,” Natalia runs straight to the pool at a speed of 1 m/s. Gwen starts off running at 3 m/s, but after two seconds slows down to a more sedate 1.5 m/s. A graph of velocity vs. time is shown below with the motion of both girls plotted.

a. Create a quantitative graph of position vs. time that shows the girls’ motion using the axes below.
b. How far away would the pool have to be for the girls to arrive there simultaneously? 

The other interesting factor is that I didn't give my students any equations. They all have to get "licensed" before I will let them use an equation- basically they have to be able to show me how they derived it. I borrowed this from Kelly (aside: this will definitely be the case for the kinematics equations, not sure about the rest of the course). Some students either remember the equations or drew a quick graph of position vs. time and derived it again, while others struggled. So... all the kids graphed the situation correctly. Partway through the assessment one student asked me if he could solve the problem graphically. I repeated his question so the whole class could hear it and then answered that a graphical solution would be acceptable, but that it wouldn't prove to me that he was proficient in the problem-solving target. I encouraged the kids to give it a shot, and one said, "well, why would I? I'm already proficient on this target, so why would I risk dropping that?" Ah the fatal flaw in my plan. I think there needs to be a new score for intentionally evading a target--> -1. In all seriousness, I should have given him a zero, which I use as meaning that the target hasn't been assessed. So his proficiency would have been history anyway. I hadn't done this in the past because sometimes the assessments I wrote were too long for our 38 minute periods, and it didn't seem fair to penalize kids for my mistake. However, this was the first question, so that excuse doesn't fly. As I write this I realize I've just solved my own dilemma. Maybe this dialogue will be useful for someone else, but at least it helped me just to write it down.

I've also been giving some thought to what other people do. Frank's SBG never removes proficiency once it's attained. Someone else (who I can;t find or remember right now, mea culpa) takes the average of all the scores to assess their performance on a standard, but weights the most recent so that it's 80% of the score. I don't particularly like this- it kicks out the idea that learning something well erases past mistakes.

Not sure about this... the students also argued that I need to tell them what standards I'm going to assess in advance so they know where to study. I find this idea repulsive, it seems like it would undermine the entire process. Has anyone else encountered this request from students?

Today I stumbled across one of the best visual explanations of the differences between traditional grading systems and SBG on Bowman Dickson's Blog:

SBG

Angry Birds with traditional grading

I really like it and want to share it with my students. This week we also took on the Red Bull Stratos Jump a la iModel iBlog - constant v for Regents, full analysis for AP. It was neat, and I appreciate the efforts of those who tabulated the data. I was planning to, but didn't get around to it, and was thrilled to find it already done.

This post turned out to be way longer than I expected. I've mentioned a lot of stuff here. I'd love to hear what others think, so if you have any thoughts please chime in. I'll close with a quote from a parent who emailed me about her daughter's performance in my AP class and time spent studying (or lack thereof) outside of class. We exchanged several emails and this stuck with me: 

"... came home very disgruntled about today’s assessment. I was quick to ask if she had done any of the practice from the website. She stormed upstairs and said, “We should just have HOMEWORK!”  I think she’ll be availing herself of those practices now."