Homework - Artifact 3
The day prior to the unit 6 quiz I assigned a homework assignment. This homework assignment asked students to select two problems from the relevant textbook chapter review. Supporting students to be reflective with the type of questions they choose to complete based on their own learning needs will facilitate their metacognitive awareness (Broekkamp & Van Hout-Wolter, 2007). In addition, it will better prepare them for an assessment. I used this assignment to get an idea of what types of questions students would select. Prior to engaging students in a metacognitive reflection on their performance on two summative assessments, unit 6 quiz and unit 6 exam, I gauged how they used homework to practice the objectives. I organized each of the questions students chose to answer based on the objectives they fulfilled in Table 1. The most frequently selected objective in the homework involved balancing chemical reactions or predicting the products. An important consideration is that these two objectives had been covered the most during instructional time. This most likely contributed to students doing problems that resembled the type of work we had recently been working on in class and on previous homework assignments.
Using this data I constructed Table 2. This table compared the homework questions students chose and their actual performance on the unit 6 exam organized by objective type. There is a correlation between the question choice and performance. The ones they performed the best on the exam, 6.3(I), 6.3(B) and 6.3(P) particularly, were the ones students had chosen to practice more with the homework assignment. This preliminary comparison between homework selection and performance on summative assessments suggests there is a correlation between the objectives students practiced in the selected homework and their performance on those objectives on the assessment. This certainly supports that there is a connection between performance on assessments of objectives and practicing the skills required to preform those objectives.
The next important step in promoting metacognitive development was for students to apply the objectives given to them as a way to self-assess their understanding given a variety of teacher introduced scaffolds. I continued to give students opportunities to do this in individual reflections of daily lessons, homework assignments, and classwork while I began to have student become more involved in relating the objectives to their individual learning progress using summative assessments. My goal was to build students’ ability to connect objectives to their own learning progress. This inquiry process of critically analyzing instructional methods to ascertain key learning goals would encourage students not only to use instructional objectives but also to scaffold a growing metacognitive awareness.
Using this data I constructed Table 2. This table compared the homework questions students chose and their actual performance on the unit 6 exam organized by objective type. There is a correlation between the question choice and performance. The ones they performed the best on the exam, 6.3(I), 6.3(B) and 6.3(P) particularly, were the ones students had chosen to practice more with the homework assignment. This preliminary comparison between homework selection and performance on summative assessments suggests there is a correlation between the objectives students practiced in the selected homework and their performance on those objectives on the assessment. This certainly supports that there is a connection between performance on assessments of objectives and practicing the skills required to preform those objectives.
The next important step in promoting metacognitive development was for students to apply the objectives given to them as a way to self-assess their understanding given a variety of teacher introduced scaffolds. I continued to give students opportunities to do this in individual reflections of daily lessons, homework assignments, and classwork while I began to have student become more involved in relating the objectives to their individual learning progress using summative assessments. My goal was to build students’ ability to connect objectives to their own learning progress. This inquiry process of critically analyzing instructional methods to ascertain key learning goals would encourage students not only to use instructional objectives but also to scaffold a growing metacognitive awareness.