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Classroom Assessment Techniques
Weekly Reports
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Description
A Weekly Report is a paper that students write analyzing and reflecting on what they have learned. It consists of three questions that students answer:
- What did I learn this week?,
- What questions remain unclear?, and
- What questions would you ask your students if you were the professor to find out if they understood the material?
Example 1: General Physics
1. What did I learn during Week #?
Physics consists of several major topics of which include: mechanics, heat (molecular physics), electricity, optics and atomic and nuclear physics. So far, we have started covering mechanics, the study of motion or the change of a position of an object with respect to another motion. When we speak of motion we should follow two models: one regarding dimensionless objects and the other regarding reference frames.
Dimensionless objects are objects whose size are less then the distance they covered. The second model states that we always need a frame of reference, For example, it would be silly to say a person sitting down is not moving. The reason for this is that the person is really moving in reference to perhaps an astronaut standing on the moon since he/she is standing on Earth, which is continuously moving. However, the person sitting down is not moving in reference to the ground. Therefore, we should always mention in reference to what we're talking about, in other words, a reference frame.
We are currently studying kinematics, a branch of mechanics that describes how objects move. Its goal is to predict the position of an object. How can we describe motion? We can describe it by using measures such as velocity and acceleration. Velocity, a vector quality, is displacement, a vector representing the shortest distance from the initial to the final position of a motion, over a certain time (). Acceleration, on the other hand, is a vector that represents the change in velocity over a certain period of time (). We can also measure the velocity and acceleration t a particular instant of time. These are called the instantaneous velocity and instantaneous acceleration. Instantaneous velocity is defined as the change in displacement over time as the limit of the change in time approaches zero. Instantaneous acceleration is defined as the change in velocity over time, as the change in time approaches zero. In class, we also learned that at constant velocity, displacement is proportional to time, and at constant acceleration, velocity is proportional to time.
The final topic we covered was free-fall. A free-falling object is any object that accelerates up or down under the influence of gravity. Free fall is represented by g, whose magnitude is equal to 9.8 m/s2. Free-fall is just a model since it doesn't really exist on Earth. It could only exist if there were no air resistance, which Earth of course lack.
Here are the important equations we learned:
Average velocity: |
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Average acceleration: |
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Instantaneous velocity: |
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Instantaneous acceleration: |
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At constant velocity: |
x t |
At constant acceleration: |
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Weekly Reports give students an opportunity to reflect on their new knowledge, ask questions about unclear ideas, and explore the value of question asking itself. By reading the report, an instructor may:
- Learn about students' conceptual difficulties and "misconceptions."
- Obtain useful feedback for reorganizing course content.
- Gain insight into how students' think about their own learning ("metacognitive processes").
- Explore students' understanding of knowledge and knowledge creation ("epistemology").
In addition to these applications in assessment, faculty have used weekly reports as a way to encourage students to reflect on their own knowledge, to organize their ideas in preparation for instruction, and to prepare for exams and review sessions. This can be accomplished best if students are asked to structure their responses to the first question, for example, to list separately the "knowledge" and "skills" they have learned. Knowledge may be assigned several categories: experimental evidence, (initial) observations, models (hypotheses), quantities and their units, laws, predictions, experiments that test predictions. Or you might choose stages of the "science learning cycle" (exploration, concept development, concept application). Thinking about these elements may help your students think about how they know what they know.
Example 2: Principles of Ecology
2. What remained unclear to you?
My confusion in this class mostly comes from not understanding words. When I was reading the text, some words were unclear even though they were defined: phenotypic plasticity, what exactly a limiting factor is, synergistic, and relative humidity. In the lecture, Prof. E spoke of haploid and diploid. Even though I know I should know what they are I don't. Many times in the packet readings I would get lost in the numbers. I wouldn't always know if the figures were good or bad, or if they were important or not. Lastly, one of the most confusing readings for me was "Exploitation of herbivore-induced plant odors by host-seeking parasitic wasps." It seemed like there was really no conclusion to it or even any kind of resolution.
3. What questions would you ask if you were the professor to determine whether your students understood this material?
a) What is the environment?
b) Give an example of an adaptation. Explain what you think causes it and how it helps the species.
c) What are the three conditions of natural selection?
d) What does William Sutherland's "Genes map the migratory route" tell us about the blackcap's navigational abilities? Include the navigational skills of the young.
e) What is the third environment?
f) What is habitat selection? Give an example.
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Assessment Purposes
- To document students' understanding of their own learning
- To investigate how well students understand the content and logical relationships in the material they are learning;
- To document students questions and select the most typical ones;
- To give students feedback concerning the content and the level of difficulty of questions they consider important;
- To capture the development of students' reasoning and writing skills over time, and
- To provide a measure of students' emotional satisfaction with the course and their levels of frustration with its content
Limitations
When done well, Weekly Reports may provide a useful and easily accessible way of probing three aspects of students' knowledge:
- Cognitive Aspects.
Responses to Question 1 offer insight into students' conceptual understandings. However, to be useful, students must provide a well-structured, in-depth exposition of the concepts, principles and theories they have studied, trying to explain how they learned what they think they did. A topical list of course content (e.g., "I learned about thermodynamics and enzymes.") does not provide the instructor with much valuable information.
- Affective Aspects.
Responses to Question 2 may reveal some well-entrenched misconceptions, but ideally they also provide evidence of students' feelings, attitudes and beliefs about the content, the course and the instructor. As with Question 1, the most useful responses do more than list course content (e.g., "I didn't understand the difference between speed and velocity."); they provide the instructor with a glimpse of students' views and feelings about lectures, laboratories, recitations, textbooks, teaching assistants, and other aspects of the course.
- Metacognitive Aspects.
Responses to all three questions provide information about students' understanding of their own learning. This kind of "self-reflective" and "self-monitoring" knowledge is essential to conceptual understanding in science, mathematics, and technological disciplines.
Perhaps the most significant limitation of Weekly Reports is that students need practice with the technique in order to provide much useful feedback to the instructor. However, normally this limitation can be overcome in a matter of a few weeks.
Example 3: Principles of Ecology
Student 16
2. What remained unclear to you?
I do not understand the process of natural selection and how it relates to the origin of species. I do not understand the theory of altruism and how it relates to natural selection. Things that may be unclear in lecture, often times, are clarified in recitation.
3. What questions would you ask if you were the professor to determine whether your students understood this material?
a) How does Gause's Law relate to the theory of natural selection and fitness?
b) How does environmental change X relate to species Z?
c) What is the consequence of arriving at a design affecting the environment without analyzing the organisms present in that environment?
d) Does the species ever affect the environment, or does the environment ever adapt due to its relationship to an organism?
Student 17
2. What remained unclear to you?
I don't quite understand what defines one ecosystem from another when so many factors are overlapping. I did not fully understand Professor E's reference to squirrels having visual adaptation and yellow lens light. He was speaking rapidly and I don't know if I heard all he said.
3. What questions would you ask if you were the professor to determine whether your students understood this material?
a) What are the three conditions that must be present for evolution by natural selection?
b) What is ecology?
c) What does an ecosystem consist of?
d) What do we mean by saying natural selection is survival of the fittest?
e) Why do birds who live on surface water catch fish?
f) Name three different types of orientations cues.
Student 18
2. What remained unclear to you?
The only questions I have are on the subject of water surface tension, density and the way water temperature and currents influence the oceans. I did not understand the example of the pond and fall and spring overturn and its relationship to water density. Prof. E was going very fast on this subject and the overhead he put up was difficult to read.
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Tell me more about this technique:
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