Reflecting on Unit 2 Assessment 3

This assessment ended up being both easy and hard for me to implement. I did almost the same set of activities last year when first starting to implement NGSS standards and practices, which made it familiar. At the same time, I have evolved a lot in how I implement the standards and practices and it was hard to not fall back to my previous ways. 

We started this unit with an article about a planet with three suns. We used Verso, which allows anonymous discussion, to post what we thought would be different if we lived on that planet. There was a lot of great discussion, before we covered the material in class, on how temperatures, seasons, eclipses, and more would be different. I actually used the same article last year, but in that case it was our final application project where they used the knowledge they had developed to discuss what would be different. 

For the assessment itself there were, as always, four parts. I will be discussing those before. at the end of our implementation of the unit there were some major changes we made in the structure of the assessment. I will add some comments about those. 

Part 1 

In this part of the assessment they gathered information about an object in the solar system and added it to a set of class slides. The goal is to look at scale of objects in the solar system. I did the same activity last year and both times the students were randomly given a name as they walked in and had to find a randomly assigned partner with the same name, that mechanism of pairing up really works well for this low impact activity. I was happy with that part of the task, but at the same time this was too easy as an entire task. I want part 1 to be accessible to all students, but there needs to be more thought and not just research to the task. In the end, on reflection, we moved Part 4 to join Part 1.

Part 2

In this part of the assessment the aim was to look at how we use technology to research about space. This task is also nice because it starts to bring in light and waves which is discussed later in the year. This is also a point where I brought in some whole class activities (more on that in a sec). In the task the students picked some space mission (Cassini, Hubble, Curiosity,...) and discussed who was involved, when it occurred, the technology involved, and the major discoveries. They used this information to make a poster (on paper, PicCollage, some even used Slides) and present the information to their group.

As for the whole class activity, one of my favorite topics in space is how we know the composition of the sun using light. I begin with some quick slides discussing subtractive vs additive color and how we perceive color. As part of that I have three colored bulbs (red, green, blue) that I can use to show how, when light combines, we perceive a different color not both or all three separately. Then we look at emission spectra and discuss how the wavelengths emitted help us identify different elements and looking at it all together helps us understand what something like a star is made of. 

Examples of Spectra

The reason I find this demo really valuable (other than the fact that it is easy to take cool pictures through your phone with the diffraction grating) is that so much of space is distant. You can show them pictures, even have them interact with the websites to explore exoplanets, but it is all distant. This is a real application. Plus it is cool, everyone should look at emission spectra. 

Overall I thought this part of the assessment went well. I was happy with the student products and the students seemed to enjoy being able to pick whatever mission they wanted. 

Part 3

In this part of the assessment we tacked the Sun, Earth, Moon models. If you haven't looked at the evidence statements for this standard, it is a beast (and that is not even including the seasons model that we tacked in assessment 4.2). 

We approached this model over three days and broke down the information as shown below:

Day 1 - Basic Model (If they look at the simulations from the previous assessment this can help them think about this basic model.)

- The Sun

- The Earth

- The Moon

- The Orbital Plane for Each

- The Orbit of Each

- The Tilt of Earth's Axis

- The Distance from the Earth to the Sun and from the Moon to the Earth

- The Time it Takes for the Earth to Rotate and Revolve

- The Time it Takes for the Moon to Revolve

Day 2 - Phases Model (The teacher may want to create a real model of phases with a ball or balloon with one side colored black and have them think about how much they can see as being illuminated as it revolves around them.)

- The Sun

- The Earth

- The Moon

- The Path Light Travels

- The Names of the Phases

- The Amount of the Moon Illuminated by the Sun

- Where, As The Moon Orbits, Each Phase Is

Day 3 - Eclipse Model (Worksheet that can be used with eclipses)

- What Arrangement of The Sun, Earth, and Moon Causes Lunar Eclipses

- What Arrangement of The Sun, Earth, and Moon Causes Solar Eclipses

- How Much of the Earth Sees Each Type Of Eclipse

It was a lot to tackle. There were some things that worked well. We did a picture sort before starting the phases model, which elicited some great group discussions and debates. I let the students choose how they made their model, some drew on paper, some on the iPad, and some used apps like PicCollage to combine actual pictures, with drawings, text, and more to make their models. But this task was a beast, and that doesn't even include the ending paragraph where they need to describe which phases we see during which type of eclipse and explain why we don't have an eclipse twice each month. Plus, some students take a long time working on making their models look super cool, which is great, but makes the assessment drag. 

As such we changed this part of the assessment to be broken down over Parts 3 and 4. 

Part 4

In this last part of the assessment the students used Actively Learn (thank you Core teachers for giving me ideas on other ways to use this site) to write a three paragraph essay discussing a planet that we could use for habitation with technology and we that we couldn't. They returned to their data from the slides to do this. To set up the assignment on Actively Learn I uploaded directions for each part and then inserted questions for each paragraph. This let me give them quick feedback as they worked. Plus, having it broken down into paragraph tasks made the overall task less imposing. I loved this task, but it didn't really fit in Part 4 and thus it moved to join Part 1. 

Overall

Overall I was happy with how the assessment turned out, but as I said there were changes. One of the big things that didn't work how I wanted it was the models. Because the task was so overwhelming in complexity of what was involved, it was hard to implement revision and reflection (a key part of modeling). As a result for many students, their models reflected what they found online more than their own individual thoughts.