Reflecting on Unit 1 Assessment 1

This new month has unintentionally signified the real end of our first task in our first NGSS unit. Most of my students are at a good place with their project and have finished either their paper, the presentation, or both. I still have some who have work to do and this year I have moved to accepting any part of these tasks late, up to a reasonable cut off, so I know I will still have the occasional item coming in.

This first assessment, the research paper, had its challenges and successes. One of the main challenges, for me, was that the structure of the task made it difficult to focus on making sure they had mastery of one part before moving onto the next. With the next assessment they start by building a car, the next part of that task requires to existence of the car, it would be hard to move ahead without mastering part 1. 

With the research paper I still have students who've yet to get mastery on the first part, the Defining Key Concepts Worksheet. These are not my students who are unable to complete the worksheet, these are the students who don't really want to do it, but are totally capable. Until they have mastery of that part they have a zero on the whole project which has a huge impact on their grade. If I were to do this again I might pull these students aside and make them work silently to complete this. As I said, these were students who are capable of completing this independently and we did go over the answers in class, so I expected them to be able to complete it on their own. For some of my other students who needed different support I already worked with them to complete this assignment.

The main success for me was the variety of their questions or topics for the paper. When you break it down (with topics on the fossil record, evolution, extinction, human impact, solar system formation, asteroids, collisions,...) there are topics that span the range of standards we'll be covering in all the units this year. Since, I am working to connect asteroids throughout the year that works great because they've already been introduced to the connections. 

Grading

With the change to NGSS our school has moved towards standards based grading and a 4 point scale. 

To give you an idea of what this looks like with my record sheet, they get 1 point (out of four) for each part they finish, with both the paper and the presentation being worth a half point. 

When I first entered the grades in the grade book the average grades for the classes were as follows: 3.2, 2.8, 2.8, 2.9, 3.1, 2.8, 2.1. A few days after I first entered the scores for my students the average grade on this project for my class periods were as follows: 3.5, 3.3, 3.4, 3.0, 3.4, 3.2, 2.4. Other than that last class (where a number of students have yet to revise their Defining Key Concepts Worksheets), the average score after they saw the impact missing parts had on the grade went up to around a B. 

Student Feedback

Whenever I finish a major activity in class I try to survey my students to get their thoughts. 

No real surprises here. The second part, the research, was difficult for some students and that was apparent when I was checking in with them in class. For the many students the initial difficulty was coming to terms with the idea that you can't necessarily Google an answer to your question. The other difficulty seemed to be that a lot of students were not use to taking a resource and pulling out information to use. I think if I even described it as taking notes on that resource they might have understood the task better. And then a number of students found the paper or presentation difficult, though with the ability to revise most who attempted it eventually did well. Plus, it is the last part of the task so challenge is not a bad thing.

For the amount of time in class my students seemed to lean more to the too much time, considering that was how I felt as well, I may reevaluate how long I spend on it.

This question was interesting to me because ultimately there was a significant percent of the class who would have picked another topic, though I am not sure how I could go about changing that.

Lastly I had my students share what they disliked and liked about the project.

For disliked the lack of a clear time frame was a comment from a few students (given that I was flexible with late work the time frame was flexible) I'll see how this goes with the next assessments this year and decide if I want to reevaluate how I present that flexible time frame. A number of students also didn't like presenting, which didn't really come as a surprise. Some other interesting comments I got from just one student (rather than being a trending comment) was that they didn't find the thinking maps helpful, that they essentially want a checkpoint rubric, and that they didn't like how the topic was somewhat limited, but weren't given a specific topic to research.

For liked many students liked that they could pick their own topic and that they learned something new. This was by far the most frequent comment given. A lot also liked that there was no due date, the amount of time in class they had to work (basically that it wasn't mostly a homework assignment), and that they could revise if they didn't succeed the first time.

Ultimately, I view this project as quite successful. I got great projects, innovative answers, and a lot of student lead investigation. It wasn't easy for everyone, but it was attainable for all. I may try to tighten up the class time a bit and want to work more to clarify the expectation of mastery; nevertheless, I am glad we spend the chunk of class time that we did researching topics that will play out throughout the year.