Lab Experiment (continued)
Over the weekend I had received no questions from students on the class website, which they have access to course content and teacher contact. As I began to collect the labs I noticed many students handing in post-labs with large portions of information missing. After the whole class discussion of the post-lab expectations I was made aware of misunderstandings of this assignment. I provided students with the option of handing in the lab the following day with a late grade. Many students opted to complete their labs with the late grade rather than handing in partially complete labs. I collected the lab and assessed their post-lab answers. The quality of students’ conclusions for the lab was surprising. The conclusion asked students to state whether the five objectives of the lab were achieved and then use evidence to support their answers. I had anticipated that by having students read the objectives before the lab as part of the pre-lab write up and with a class discussion before the lab was assigned specifically about the objectives, would support a thorough and thoughtful conclusion. As I read through the students’ conclusions I noticed nearly half of the students either didn’t write a conclusion or wrote a one-sentence answer with no supporting evidence (Document 3). The commonality I noticed among these conclusions were statements such as “evidence is all in the packet” or that the objectives were achieved “by the evidence by the observation of labs.” These generalized statements did not allow for any meaningful assessment of student understanding. On the other hand, some students wrote thoughtful explanations of how the objectives were achieved with specific supportive evidence from the lab. They cited the reactions of particular stations in the lab activity, such as “when we put a piece of magnesium into a test tube and put HCl. The magnesium changed from gray to white” or “This lab also made us learn how to balance chemical equations since we learned that if you start with a certain amount [of elements], you end with the same amount [of elements]” (Document 2). There was a clear disconnect among reading the objectives, conducting the experiment, and writing a summarizing paragraph about the connection between the objectives and the tasks preformed. This solidified for me how critical it is to provide students with explicit objectives and instructions about my expectations for what a summary or conclusions consists of. That means concise objectives, directions, teacher modeling, time for student practice and questions, and teacher and peer feedback on student summaries.
Next I tried to develop metacognition by engaging students to use their performance in a summative assessment in a reflective manner to support their ability to self-assess their understanding on the content and think about how they will improve in the future. The first step was to model for students in a class activity how to use their unit outline to identify what specific objective the questions of a quiz, homework, or class activity met. Instead of using objectives as rigid teacher made guidelines of the class expectations I involved students in the break down of each objective. This meant having students list specifically what skills they needed to complete each objective. Having students in a more active role in interpreting the learning objectives and analyzing what the objectives mean to them as individual learners will support their metacognitive development by broadening the use of objectives and how students’ interactions with objectives look in a high school classroom. The next step to this was having students interact with the objectives in relation to their performance on summative assessments.
Next I tried to develop metacognition by engaging students to use their performance in a summative assessment in a reflective manner to support their ability to self-assess their understanding on the content and think about how they will improve in the future. The first step was to model for students in a class activity how to use their unit outline to identify what specific objective the questions of a quiz, homework, or class activity met. Instead of using objectives as rigid teacher made guidelines of the class expectations I involved students in the break down of each objective. This meant having students list specifically what skills they needed to complete each objective. Having students in a more active role in interpreting the learning objectives and analyzing what the objectives mean to them as individual learners will support their metacognitive development by broadening the use of objectives and how students’ interactions with objectives look in a high school classroom. The next step to this was having students interact with the objectives in relation to their performance on summative assessments.