Reflecting on Unit 1 Assessment 2

I went into this assessment intrigued with how my students would do compared to the first one. This assessment was mostly engineering challenges and labs (generally engaging), the last was a large research paper (not the most thrilling for all students...at least the writing part). 

Overall What intrigued me in the end was that overall, the classes didn't do dramatically better on this assignment in terms of overall score, but there were differnces. The paper was a really clear progression both through the task itself and through difficulty, what ended up is I had a number of students who scored low because it was difficult to get them engaged in the assignment. However, a lot of students were able to make it to the last part and successfully complete the paper. With this new assessment, which was focused on the engineering task of building the balloon powered car, almost all students finished the first two parts of the assessment, but fewer received a perfect score of 4 because the last two parts were more challenging.

Looking at the whole assessment one of the successes was how the students did in choosing an investigative approach for the third task. They had to investigate both how balanced and unbalanced forces change motion and how mass changes motion. This is not an easy task to do. However, the students amazed me with the creativity of their approaches to the challenge.

One of the challenges was the engineering design task itself. The students were engaged and all groups were ultimately successful in building a working car, but the whole process was new to me. Getting the groups to focus on all steps of the process was a challenge for me because it was new to me. I imagine this only gets easier as the process becomes more familiar.

Grading
I feel like as the year progresses I am getting more of a hang on the grading process. The structure of this assessment helped with one of my challenges last assessment, which was getting things graded quickly. Last assessment had some really quick parts which were hard to get graded before the students moved onto the next. For this assessment all the parts took more time. This made grading easier, though I am sure this will vary by assessment.

What I Would Do Different

• I wanted to try out wikiprojects with the first assessment for the engineering design process. While this worked for some students, the lack of structure meant that other groups who were less familiar with the process missed documenting steps. A Google Slides document with a page for each step of the process might help with this. 
• For the second activity with Newton's laws it went well, breaking it up by law per day seemed to work well. At the same time some students struggeled more than expected at making an annotated picture or really understanding what that is. I would want to clarify the expectation there more at the start of the assignment.
• I am struggling with the tracking and monitoring sheet, it comes across to my students as something that is just a task, rather than something the are benefiting from. I understand its purpose and want something to fill the role, but I feel like that sheet is not working for me.

What I Would Do the Same

• The ammount of materials provided for the car build seemed good. It was enough for any group to make a car, but still encouraged students to explore other materials and bring stuff from home. And I liked the challenge in general, making the car was achievable for all groups.
• I also really like the Teacher Assessment Record sheet. It is working well to quickly motitor progress through the assessment for each student and takes little time to complete.