Fizzics

I’ve been “tagged” for one of these blog themes that go round from time to time. I usually avoid them, like the emails that say you have to send them on or there will be consequences. This one is a little different though. I have looked at a lot of blog entries with the same title and it is amazing to see what others show to communicate their inspirations in education.

In my tardiness, I have been tagged by both Mrs Moodle and Nick Hood.  Here, finally, is my image.

photo uploaded by jurvetson

Those of you who know I teach Physics will think it’s an obvious choice of image. What is it that appeals to me here? It’s obviously a geeky image with kids taking apart a piece of electronics (it’s a betamax vcr). What I really like is the fact that it is years since Betamax lost the VCR format wars but this device still has value today.

We throw things out unnecessarily these days. There is a lot of educational value in older equipment, particularly in electronics.  Modern equipment is often constructed with a built in obsolescence that prevents repair or makes it uneconomic (so much for sustainability) that often also makes it difficult to see the individual components when we remove the outer cover.

In taking things apart, we offer active and engaging learning.  Ask pupils questions as they “dissect” an old vcr, freeview box or electric sander.  Better still, get them to film the event and add a commentary afterwards -  which part are they removing, what role did it have in the unit ?

I’ve just acquired an old colour portable TV.  My next S3 class will be assessed on their video of this “alien’s” autopsy. 

I’m meant to tag 5 people now.  It’s unlikely I will find five who have not completed this challenge but I shall try tagging

• Tom Barrett
• Alan Stewart
• Andrew Rathie
• David Noble
• Kristian Still

It’s not so long ago that I shared some things I learned during a traffic lighting exercise with two S3 classes.  Now that the end of the school year is approaching, I have found myself handing out questionnaires to senior classes to find out what they thought of the course they have just completed.  The questions are not mine, they came from much further up the chain of command.  Given the feedback I have received, I am actually relieved to have no responsibility for putting the questions together.

I have not compiled a statistical analysis of the responses, I just skimmed thourgh the sheets as I headed off to hand them in to my boss.  However, I thought I would share the following responses with you as they stood out as recurring themes.

1. Was the course what you expected it to be? Yes but there was more/less maths than expected.
2. Did you enjoy the course? Yes
3. What did you like about the course? Lots of youtube and computer stuff to show us and keep us interested, other teachers say they are a waste of time.
4. What are other departments doing that we could be doing to improve your learning experience? The Physics labs are dumps! Can’t you at least paint them?

The first response interests me as it shows that some kids enter physics with a preconceived idea that it will be all about maths, while others barely notice the numerical side of the course.  It’s true to say that there is a numeracy divide in Physics and it is a shame that all we offer pupils on the other side is Intermediate 1, despite their often strong reasoning and explaining skills.

The third response in that list is interesting too.  As someone who has fought to have youtube.com unblocked for staff, I have continued to make full use of it to help pupils visualise a new concept as it is introduced.  It’s also very helpful in flushing out those persistent misconceptions.  Clearly, this response shows that my colleagues wouldn’t notice if access had remained blocked.

The final response is one with which I agree.  My room is a tip.  Partly due to circumstances I won’t air here but also due to the ongoing plan to move science into another part of the school.  Other rooms are being given a lick of paint, new carpet, perhaps even some new furniture.  Since my room is scheduled to be ripped out as soon as someone finds the cash to do so, I must continue to work in less than satisfactory conditions with broken floor tiles, 50 year-old stools and shabby walls that I try to hide behind posters.

More important than all of this is the verbal feedback I received.  Many of the pupils had completed the same survey in Biology and Chemistry earlier in the week and were now sick of it.  Their point was simple.  If we don’t care enough to taylor the survey to the subject in question then it sends a signal that we probably don’t care too much about their responses either.  They’ve got a point, haven’t they?  While some of my classes have already started study leave, I still have a week or so before the others head off.  I think there’s still time for me to provide a more personalised approach to the pupil survey.

I read that Stewart Mader is starting a series targetted at people currently without a wiki. He’s calling the initiative 21 Days of Wiki Adoption and each day of the event will see a new video added to the series.

I’m going to pay attention to what he says. I should have had a wiki by now. I entered the Rolls-Royce Science Prize last year - read my entry here rolls-royce-science-prize.pdf. My idea was to build a wiki resource with S2 pupils to use in Science class, a wiki written by pupils for other pupils and using audio and video to aid accessibility and promote collaboration among lower ability class sets. Unfortunately, the panel of judges didn’t find sufficient merit in my plan and I had to make do with a small shiny plaque for the school library wall.

I bumped into one of the competition manages at the Scottish Learning Festival in September and he told me that the judges felt there was too much ICT and not enough Science in my submission. There I was thinking that the whole point of the exercise was to improve Science teaching, not do more Science. But what do I know? In the meantime, here I am.

A year has passed and the bottom ability S2 Science set feature on my timetable once more. The course is still not meeting their needs and I am still having to drag them kicking and screaming (them and me both) up to the page in the notes that will feature in their exam at the end of this month.

Both S3 classes had a brief glimpse at their survey results today. These were raw results, not filtered by class, so each bar chart shows 40 respondents rather than the 20 you would expect for a science class.

I realised that I had done something stupid in questions 8 & 9, with results that are sufficiently interesting for me to share them. Question 8 asked pupils to rate themselves using the statement

“I know that electrical energy transformed each second =IV”

From the image below, we see that only 50% of my S3 pupils are confident that they know this.

To help non-physicists see what is interesting, I need to explain that

energy transformed each second = power

current has the symbol I

voltage has the symbol V

Armed with this, have a look at the details for question 9 (below) and the responses I received to the statement

“I can perform calculations involving power, current and voltage.”

These two questions are asking the same thing, yet an extra 35% of the pupils felt that they had achieved the learning outcome.

The reason for the difference lies in the language used to express the question. What does this tell me? I think it tells me two things - three things if I include checking the questions before I set them!

First of all, the learning is not as secure as I would like. While pupils might know the relationship that exists between power, current and voltage, they lack a sufficiently deep understanding to put this relationship into context.  The second point is that the language we use to frame a question plays a critical role in determining whether or not pupils can provide an answer. How much of the assessment we put children through is a true assessment of the subject area in question and how much is a test of their ability to unpick the language of assessment to identify find the real question underneath?

One of the two S3 classes has now completed the surveymonkey self-assessment survey on their current unit. I ran the survey as a “kiosk” by setting up a laptop with internet access on a table at the back of the classroom, well away from prying eyes. In a 50 minute lesson, I found I could get 10 pupils to complete the survey. It didn’t take 5 minutes each but I got them all to watch me go through the first two screens of the survey with them on a whiteboard each time they came to class.

I thought I had been smart by setting up two different collectors, one for each class, but it seems that the results are being lumped together as 40 respondents rather than 2 groups of 20. Luckily, I still have the custom data field with the unique identifier to help me sort them back into class sets of data. One of my concerns has been that each class has had a different experience with me and I want to see if this is born in the self-assessment. I’ll share some data over the weekend once the pile of prelim marking is out of the way.

I tried traffic lighting during one of the more conceptually difficult units of standard grade physics with my S3 class last year. The results were encouraging, not because they all considered themselves “green” but because the whole class engaged with the activity and I was able to do quite a lot with the responses I received.

I have two S3 classes this year and I thought that I would see how they thought they were progressing by repeating the activity. The first class I tried it with said they thought it was a waste of time. They thought I had my own opinion of their progress and whatever they thought about their own performance would not change my mind. The second class reacted differently to the idea. They were interested but privacy was a major issue for them. How could they express their true thoughts without revealing any potential shortcomings to their peers. They told me that one of the MFL teachers makes everyone close their eyes and she has pupils raising their hand when green, amber or red is read aloud. They don’t like this approach either.

Today, I decided to spend some time coming up with something different. I have signed up for a free basic account at SurveyMonkey and have prepared a series of 10 questions (the most you can have on the free account) for self assessment. As I don’t know their email addresses, I have had to use a partially-supported method involving a unique identifier at the end of the link to the survey (more about that here). I am going to try the web survey technique this week. I’ll share the results once I figure out what they mean.

I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers making comment on Google’s launch of their knowledge service “knol” this week.  There’s a lot of chatter on how move this is an assault on Wikipedia (here, here & here for example) but is it really?    
There are people who love  Wikipedia and there are others who, perhaps rightly, question the accuracy of the information, agenda of the contributors or the authority of the volunteers who do the editing.  With Knol, Google gets away from these arguments by having pages (knols) written by experts in that subject.   
Google has invited people it considers experts to contribute some knols for their beta phase.  These people will receive a 50% cut of advertising revenue from their own pages and a further element of competition exists in that Google anticipates more than one knol on a subject.  It looks as if authors can expect to go head to head with rival experts in terms of page rank, page views and advertising revenue but I’m not sure which of these is the best indicator of quality from our perspective.  Which knol page meets the need that drove us to the web for inforamtion in the first place? 
I have another problem with the knol idea.  In terms of learning it’s a backward step.  A move that I see more as an attack on Encyclopedia Britannica than Wikipedia.  The knol concept takes an expert who delivers content to the reader.  It’s essentially a traditional education model, the very model that Wikipedia is trying to break.  In education-speak, we have knol handing out information to passive learners while Wikipedia encourages active learning and participation - the Holy Grail of current education policy.