Analyzing My Own FCI Data

I'm in that glorious time of year known as My Student Teacher's Solo Period where I just sit in the library and get other work done, while my intern handles my classes. How did I get so lucky?

So what have I been doing with all my time? Besides running an uncontested campaign for City Council, co-organizing the Montpelier Energy Fair, and refinancing my mortgage, I've been crunching data from my classroom.

Oh gosh this is embarrassing. But I think it's healthy to just put it out there!

I've been using the Force Concept Inventory (FCI) since 2007 as a pre and post test for my students, to see if I have actually taught them any physics. In case you're not familiar the FCI is a nationally recognized physics test and I could be comparing my results with traditionally taught classrooms or project-based classrooms all over the country, and that's great, but it seems too that at least in my case - there's something to be said for gaining experience. The algorithm for Normalized Point Gain (G) is (Average post test score -Average pre-test score)/(100 - Average pre-test score)

Back in 2010 I was floored by how good my scores were, and then in 2011 you can imagine my disappointment. Was 2010 just a good dream? What happened? This of course led to a serious revamp of some specific units and putting my entire curriculum in digital form. Apparently it's paying off! It appears yet again that I'm making progress. I've already disaggregated the data to tell me which unit is my weakest, so I know where to focus my energies for next year! 

In an industry where your product graduates, it's good to feel like you're making some kind of progress. 

Building Cider Presses with a Physics Class

At the beginning of the year I had this great plan for my Experimental Physics course. We could build cider presses in the fall (tis the season), and use them as a vehicle for learning about simple machines, force, and torque. Sounds brilliant, right? Engaging! Interesting! Culturally relevant!

Buuuut yeaaaa... Oh dear. They're still not done and it's quarter 2 now (yikes!). We have the school harvest festival on Tuesday, and we were hoping to get them TOTALLY completed by then. That may still happen - we just have some pieces that need to get welded and then attached, and BOOM. Done. And I, for one, will be very pleased to let them go. Btw, we're auctioning them off... more news on that to come.

With the imminent end of this gigantic process just around the corner I've been reflecting on how I would do this differently next time. Let's just say, there were several things I would do differently should I do this project again. Here were the problems and their potential solutions.

1. The groups were too big, thus too many people were unengaged.
Next time, the Maximum group size: 3
2. This was pretty much the first thing we did as a class, so I didn't know people's strengths, personalities, and group dynamics.
Next time, I wouldn't do a giant project right off the bat.
3. This class does not meet for 1.5 periods like my other physics class. There's less time in general, soooo...
Next time, I don't have a solution for this :P. Maybe require more out-of-class work to be done on these presses?
4. I allowed them pretty much free reign to choose a design for their presses. They looked at other people's plans, but in the end each group really did their own thing. This made the process much longer and more complicated, potentially more valuable, as well, but not when you have a limited amount of time.
Next time, I would have a more cut & dry plan that everyone follows....


Really? Did I just say that? I think really what I want is to have more time, more flexibility. I like Amir Abo-Shaeer's model where kids are required to put in x-hours of time into the class, and they can come in whenever to get stuff done, so long as they get it done.

Truth be told, I don't know if I would do this project again, unless I was teaching specifically an engineering class. I was thinking about proposing that, but (sssshhhhhh...) I've never taken any engineering courses. Lots of math and chem and physics. Bio even. But no engineering.

While I'm talking about dreaming of other courses, I've been thinking about the possibility of teaching a course I would call "the science of survival", but I'll leave that for another post.

Soooo... now what? Transitioning into the curriculum

This the part of the year where I pause a little bit and wonder how the heck do I start the real stuff? I'm perpetually tempted to solicit from students even the most mundane of details, just to prove to myself that they are thinking. But the kinds of questions I'm prone to asking during lecture could be most accurately described as "fill in the blank" for which the context makes it painfully clear what the answer should be: This is not critical thinking.

Today I had a brainwave and since I didn't have a class until half way through the day I had time to make it happen, much to my relief. After setting up the concept chart and supplying them with details about position, displacement, and time, it was time to start thinking about velocity... since there's really not a whole lot you can do with those fundamental measurements (besides perhaps discussing their origins, the nature of the smallest increment, and personal applications, e.g. the length of one's stride or the time it takes to start & stop a timer).

So on to velocity we plowed, and here were the questions I posed in a ppt slide with instructions to work on the questions in groups:
1) What is speed in terms of the items on your concept chart?
2) In what units do we measure speed, and what do those units tell us about what speed is composed of?
3) Write an equation for speed based on your answer to the above.
4) Is this equation always true? When is it not? What are its limitations?

As far as I can tell all the groups came to the correct conclusions, but now I'd like to know which question was most helpful for the creation of the equation which they created?

I'm inspired to ask such a question because of my recent reading of The Teaching Gap, which describes (among other very interesting things) the value Japanese school place on multiple methods. They don't require that all students use the same method to solve a problem, but observe, rather, that statistically speaking certain percentages of students will be prone to solving a problem through a handful of methods. So, of course, I'm very curious to see the distribution of methods the students used to come up with the equation... or perhaps since they worked in groups, I'll have to frame it more like, "Which question helped you personally understand what the equation ought to be?"

Update on the Women in Engineering: We're about to start our first project, so I'll see if I can put together a post-survey regarding their enthusiasm. I'll let you know what I find. :)

Collaborating with other Physics Teachers

After the 7am-11pm intense week at Engineering Camp I flew to Portland, Oregon to meet up with two other Knowles Fellow physics teachers (Zach Ronneberg, and Bradford Hill) to work on streamlining our curricula, adding essential questions, and exchanging ideas in general. And basically it was a wicked sweet time. 

As a result of this week I will be: 

• adding a unit on thermo, where we'll build some kind of cool sun-energy device like a solar oven, hot dog cooker, or parabolic trough type device. We'll heat up water, use Q=cm(T2-T1).  It'll be great.
  
• using OmniOutliner to track my curriculum (hazaa!) 
  
• Oh yea we built these IR diode devices to use in conjunction with a Wii remote to function like a SmartBoard, only for about $50 instead of $2,000. hAha!  
  
• I've got a ton of essential questions now
• My unit on Egg Bungee Jumping is now "differentiated" 
• I've decided to go with the "learning is not optional" motto. So that when students get done they still have to work on something - even if it's grabbing a Scientific American from the back of the room. This is critical for differentiated instruction to be functional.

Other things I learned include: Portland O is pretty much just like Vermont only more populated. Similar values. Similar zoning laws. Similar lifestyles (frisbee, raspberry picking, Subaru-driving). 

I'd say at least 30% of the benefit of being a Knowles Fellow is hanging out with other Knowles Fellows, cause they're so driven, interesting, and bursting with ideas. So that made this  trip one of the best Summer Professional Development things I've done through Knowles yet. 

Concept Attainment Game

This past weekend was the Knowles Science Teaching Foundation's Spring Meeting for the '04 cohort (which I'm a part of) in San Diego, CA. Amy Germundson from Virginia (who's working with Carole Ann Tomlinson, a "Differentiated Instruction" genius) worked with our cohort to help us critique a differentiated instruction lesson from our own classrooms: totally helpful. One of the techniques I learned was called Concept Attainment. So here's how you play:

I give Positive Examples and Negative Examples of a principle or pattern and you hypothesize about what the principle/rule is.

Hey, let's try it:

Positive Examples
mud
jersey cows
chocolate

Negative Examples
ripe watermelon
the sun
fresh snow

If you guessed "Things that are brown", then you win!

Do you get how it works? Ok, let's try a harder one:

Positive Examples
Biomass
Wind power
Hydro (dam) power


Negative Examples
Geothermal
Nuclear Fission
Hydro (tidal) power

i'll post the answer in the comments section ;)

Physics Teaching Resources

Just the other day I received this question, so I thought I'd share the answer:

I have a question relating to High School physics. I have been asked to help someone kinda do a home school physics class. I was wondering if you had any suggestion on a good physic book or any other sources on line.


The first is diagnoser.com, a resource for eliciting student misconceptions around different physics concepts. It sounds like it ought to be something like WebMD, but no, it's for physics education :) Teachers select the topic and can pick which questions they'd like to ask, and then it gives you a report of what misconceptions your students have: super cool.

Conceptual Physics by Paul Hewitt is a really fantastic curriculum, which I would highly recommend for a textbook.

Besides that, Arizona State University has something called "Modeling Curriculum" which is also excellent, though slightly more advanced (I mainly rely on their material for my classroom). I'd say it's one of the best available curricula I've seen.
http://modeling.asu.edu/