The bulk of this week was spent wrapping up acceleration by doing some problems with free fall. It took some time, but my students are getting comfortable with graphical solutions instead of more traditional approaches. Students continue to talk about what’s happening in the problem, rather than the formulas, which is great to see. A few kids are trying to memorize formulas, but watching their peers who use the graphs apply what they know to new situations with relative ease has helped convert the memorizers.
Student work on a free fall problem
This week was also the first test in physics, and a lot of kids “took the bet and lost.” Based on the reading and thinking I’ve been doing about assessment and grades, I’m grading a lot less than in previous years. The trick is, students used to the way most teachers grade translate not graded as not worth doing. Not surprisingly, these students were not prepared for the test. That said, even when I’ve graded almost everything, I’ve had students find ways to copy or otherwise get out of doing the daily work, then have the first test hit them like a truck.
To try and address this problem, I stole an idea from Frank Noschese and have been giving my students weekly, self-graded quizzes. In addition to all the other benefits of frequent, low-stakes assessments, I hoped my students would figure out the benefits of engaging in the daily work early on. It worked for most of my students, and I saw more students digging into their work after the first quiz, but the stakes were too low for others to catch on.
I’m doing a two-stage collaborative exam for this test, so students will have a chance to recover come Monday. I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes. In the future, however, I’d like to work on strategies to get students away from the idea that not graded means not worth doing a lot earlier. I may make those early quizzes worth more points (at least on paper) or split our 1D motion into separate tests over constant velocity and uniform acceleration so that students will be taking the first test a lot sooner.
Science is a Verb 