Formative assessment happens during learning, usually in the classroom. Students do something, like an assignment, and get immediate feedback on what they did. A teacher walking around from student to student or group to group, following what the students are doing and helping students identify which concepts they’re not getting, is a typical example of formative assessment.
Authentic assessments are assignments that are or mimic real-world problems, and require students to apply the stuff they should have learned to solving them. I’m using projects like the draining of a bottle and carpet friction experiments to assess if my students truly understand why they do algebra and calculus, and are able to apply the techniques they’ve learned.
Caveat: It is important to note, however, that being able to solve real-world problems requires some abstract thinking skills that adolescents are still developing. Yet, even though a lot of the basic learning in middle and high school consists of ingesting the language of the different fields of study — they type of thing that is easy to test — a more useful assessment is likely to be one that requires students to use their new vocabulary in written assignments, such as project reports and essays.
There was a neat little conference today, organized by LEGO’s Education division. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to include robotics in my math and science classes, but since I haven’t had the time to delve into it, I was wondering if the LEGO Robotics sets would be an easy way to get started. It turns out that they have a lot of lesson plans and curricula available that are geared for kids all the way from elementary to high school, so I’m seriously considering giving it a try.
Pedagogically, there are a lot of good reasons to integrate robotics into our classes, particularly as the cornerstone of a project-based-learning curriculum.
The act of building robots increases engagement in learning. Just like assembling Ikea furniture makes people like it better, when students build something the accomplishment means more to them.
Working on projects builds grit, because no good project can succeed without some obstacles that need to be overcome. Success comes through perseverance. Good projects build character.
The process of building robots provides a sequence of potential “figure it out” moments because of the all steps that go into it, especially when students get ambitious about their projects. And students learn a whole lot more when they discover things on their own.
Projects don’t instill the same stress to perform as do tests. Students learn that learning is a process where you use your strengths and supplement your weaknesses to achieve a goal. They learn that their worth is more than the value of an exam.
Projects promote creativity, not kill it like a lot of traditional education.
In terms of the curriculum, Physics and Math applications are the most obvious: think about combining electronics and simple machines, and moving robots around the room for geometry. A number of the presenters, Matthew Collier and Don Mugan for example, advocate for using it across the curriculum. Mugan calls it transdisciplinary education, where the engineering project is central to all the subjects (in English class students do research and write reports about their projects).
I’ve always favored this type of learning (Somewhat in the Air is a great example), but one has to watch out to make sure that you’re covering all the required topics for a particular subject. Going into one thing in depth usually means you have to sacrifice, for the moment at least, some width. The more you can get free of the strictures of traditional schooling the better, because then you don’t have to make sure you hit all the topics on the physics curriculum in the seemingly short year that you officially teach physics.
The key rules about implementation that I gleaned from presentations and conversations with teachers who use the LEGO robotics are that:
Journaling is essential. Students are going to learn a lot more if they have to plan out what they want to do, and how to do it, in a journal instead of just using trial-and-error playing with the robots.
Promote peer-teaching. I advocate peer teaching every chance I get; teaching is the best way to learn something yourself.
2 kids per kit. I heard this over and over again. There are ways of making larger groups work, but none are ideal.
A Plan of Action
So I’m going to try to start with the MINDSTORM educational kit, but this requires getting the standard programming software separately. One alternative would be to go with the retail kit, which is the same price and has the software (although I don’t know if anything else is missing).
I think, however, I’ll try to get the more advanced LabVIEW software that seems to be used usually for the high school projects that use the more sophisticated TETRIX parts but the same microcontroller brick as the MINDSTORM sets. LabVIEW might be a little trickier to learn, but it’s based on the program used by engineers on the job. Middle and high students should be able to handle it. But we’ll see.
Since LabVIEW is more powerful, it should ease the transition when I do upgrade to the TETRIX robots.
The one potential problem that came up, that actually affects both software packages, is that they work great for linear learners, but students with a more random access memory will likely have a harder time.
At any rate, not I have to find a MINDSTORM set to play with. Since I’m cheap I’ll start by asking around the school. Rumor has it that there was once a robotics club, so maybe someone has a set sitting around that I can burrow. We’ll see.
Page 1 of my notes: Diagram of our mysterious mixture.Sealed jar with a number of unknown substances.
The middle school started science this week with a mysterious jar of unknown substances: a couple immiscible liquids; some plastics and metals of different densities.
As they try to separate and identify the mixture they’ll be learning about handling potentially hazardous materials, material physical and chemical properties (like density and pH), and a little chemistry.
But the first thing they need to learn is how to take notes. Science starts (and ends) with observation. Careful observation. And most middle schoolers need mentoring to make sure their notes are rigorous.
To this end, after they wrote up their observations of what was in the jar, I put together my own notes as a general reference. This is not the only way to take notes, but I’m going to have them amend their own notes to make sure they’re neater and have as much detail as possible.
Page 2 of notes on the mysterious jar.Page 3 of notes on the mysterious jar.
EPA's Cleanups in My Community map for St. Louis and its western suburbs.
Want to find your nearest superfund site? The EPA has an interactive page called, Clean Up My Community, that maps brownfields, hazardous waste, and superfund sites anywhere in the U.S.
Note:
Brownfields are places, usually in cities, that can’t be easily re-developed because there’s some existing pollution on the site.
Superfund sites are places where there is hazardous pollution that the government is cleaning up because the companies that caused the pollution have gone out of business, or because the government caused the pollution in the first place. The military is probably the biggest source of government pollution, particularly from fuel leaks and radioactive waste.
The EPA's Surf Your Watershed site's Lower Missouri page.
The EPA has a number of excellent tools on its website that give access to a lot of environmental information. The Surf Your Watershed pages are particularly nice because they have specific links to citizen-based groups working in your watershed. Ours is the Lower Missouri Watershed, and the groups working there include schools, groups concerned about fish, and land trusts.
The site also links to the USGS streamflow data and some of their scientific research done in the area.
I’ve been thinking about science fiction, like Mirable and The Chrysalids that tie into the Natural World (science) curriculum. While I’ve not read Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars triology, Red Mars, Blue Mars and Green Mars, they’ve won a number of awards and I’ve heard good things about them.
I’m looking for books that address global ecology, so stories about terraforming Mars would seem to fit. The Mars triology books are also supposed to be fairly rigorous and consistent about the science, something I look for in good science fiction. There are also some good articles discussing the science that can be used for supporting information, like this one by Margarita Miranova (2008) about the actual feasibility of terraforming Mars.
Feature identified by students from Evergreen Middle School. Image from NASA.
Given Mars’ proximity and the fact that space agencies have orbiting satellites and ground rovers makes the idea of colonizing Mars an intriguing one for the more adventurous adolescents. In fact, the recent news that 7th graders discovered a new feature on Mars’ surface might also inspire some interest. The 7th graders’ project was part of the Mars Student Imaging Program (MSIP), which might also be of interest. MSIP actually allows students to use the camera on board the Mars Odyssey satellite, by identifying locations for detailed images.
Suzie Boss and Jane Krauss have a new book out on using information technology in large-scale projects called, “Reinventing Project-Based Learning“. While you can do great projects without technology, they say,
… what a richer, more authentic landscape it is when students have access to resources, tools, strategies, and concerns found outside the classroom walls.
There are a ridiculous amount of real data available out their on the web, from economic data (FRED) to real-time stream gauging for the entire U.S. (USGS). And many come with online tools to process the data.
In addition, things like wikis make collaboration possible even for home-work projects in a way that was not possible in the past.
For myself, the book provides an interesting guide for for tailoring and improving the structure of the projects I already do, but there is a good bit of information introducing different types of technology to those interested in incorporating it for the first time. I’d be interested to see what teachers new to experimenting with project-based learning with new technology think about the book.
