Week 10 Reflection

This week ended the second assessment, the balloon powered race car. It is hard to reflect in too much detail yet as I still need to finish grading the projects, but overall it went well.

I feel like the students actual understanding of the laws of motion is much better this year compared to last year in terms of application. I imagine they would not do as well on a quick purely fact based multiple choice test, though, as we've not been practicing that as a skill.

That is the main challenge with these assessments and NGSS in general. While I certainly don't think someone's success or lack of on a pop quiz is a good assessment of real understanding, there are some things that do end up needing to be explicitly taught, or at least explicitly taught to some students. The balance is figuring out which topics and facts they can discover, which they need some support on, and which need to be explicitly taught.

The pre-assessment I did back in October gave me some initial thoughts about this and my hope is that the post-assessment I will do after this whole unit will help as well.

Given this week was the end of the assessment and the week before our two week break, we ended friday with a fun supplemental activity. The students used the stop motion app Koma Koma and Play-Doh to show how force and energy are related. They worked as a groups to make these and then presented them to the class with an explanation.



It was a successful supplemental activity in my books as it had the students working together to solve a tricky task (as most did not innately know how to show this relation). Plus, for those who struggle with science or have less general interest in it, the creative aspect let them be involved in the video creation even if they were not the one leading the idea.  

(You can see a couple of the videos here - minus student comments as they just explained them out loud to the class. Video 1 and Video 2.)

We also had another supplemental activity this week, one on air resistance and gravity. As we get towards the end of the assessments I find that my students need more activities that let them step away from the assessment for a bit, basically they need a break. This activity is one I've done before and just modified to fit my expectations for it this year. I think the concept of object falling at the same speed (without air resistance) is important, but hadn't been covered yet this year, so this activity also gave me an opportunity to introduce that.