I saw this in my academic lab, which shows the CNN Student News every morning and thought that this would be a great application example to show my students.
What happens is that a characteristic symptom of Parkinson’s is uncontrollable tremors, which can affect the vocal muscles of those suffering form the disease. A program would analyze the voice pattern and be able to tell if tremors are occurring and make a diagnosis.
Here is the link, the clip is towards the end.
This post will mesh the two classes that I am taking this quarter: Assessment and my Secondary Science CIA course. I have been lucky that my one elective for my program happened to work out as being an assessment course because it helps me as I move forward in making my own assessments.
In reading Popham I couldn’t help but think that the general public lacks any sort of understanding of how tests work and the roles they play in making inferences about the educational system (teachers, students, schools). I understand that there are some members of the community who truly understand the correlation between quality assessments and inferences, but for the most part, we are a society that likes to gravitate towards the latest and greatest phenomenon (see Waiting for Superman).
What I have found, and what Popham says, is that the inferences are only as good (and valid) as the assessments and educators making the inferences. If an assessment is poorly written or influenced by poorly aligned standards, then the inferences are going to be off base. The student results may show that they understood what was being presented in the course, but the assessments may only be very superficial. In addition, the assessments influence the actions of educators within the classroom. I have witnessed the skipping of topics in my classroom due to the fact that the End of Course Exams do not cover a specific topic or the standards to not stress the topic. To me, this is what hinders educators in doing their best job. If educators are always worried about what inferences are being made about them or their students, then they will change how they teach and sacrifice depth for coverage. Likewise, the assessments given at the end of school years will also greatly influence teacher practices, which ties their hands in terms of creativity and style. No teacher is the same, so why ask them to teach to a test that may or may not be written properly? If new and current educators are being put through such a rigorous screening process (TPA, WEST exams, National Boards, Professional Certification) then why is there such a need to assess on a standardized basis how the students are learning?
What role should writing play in science? Should students be required to submit notebooks that chronicle every little piece of writing that they have done over the course of the school year, or should their notebooks reflect how scientists use them? Along with these questions comes the issue of assessment. How should teachers assess notebooks, for completion or for thinking?
In my experience with notebooks, students are required to put everything that is written in class into them. Their notebooks are their own resource to study form and to record all things that have occurred in the course . The issue, I find, is that students and teachers begin to jus look for completion when homework is assigned or when pre labs are required. Teachers begin the year looking for complete sentences and thoughtful responses, but by the end of the first month the teachers have become so overwhelmed with the notebooks that they begin to give credit simply for completion. I have an issue with this. There needs to be a clear decision made about the role notebooks should play in the classroom and how writing will be assessed. When students write for completion instead of thought, then the purpose of a scientific notebook is lost.
In science, notebooks are used to jot down ideas and keep track of what a scientist has thought of and the procedures taken to carry out experiments. They are the place where reflection occurs after experiments and further experimentation is examined. They are not the place where random warm up questions are written down, and simple brainstorming questions are copied. At some point, the notebooks need to be a place where students take the deep conversations that they have had about a topic and relate them towards critical thinking in a larger scientific context.
I believe that notebooks have lost their way in science courses. Warm ups are fine, as long as they serve a greater purpose, but when they are just time killers they also become space fillers. Notebooks should be a place where students truly practice how to write in science in a manner that real scientists also would.
One the most difficult parts about teaching, I have found, is how to assess students when they are asked to submit a written assignment. What I have found (from taking an assessment course this quarter) is that having a very specific rubric will make my job much simpler when grading writing samples. However, I still struggle with how to grade students when their writing is not up to the standard that I know it should be at.
I understand that I am not an English teacher, and that my job is to assess the knowledge that is being conveyed through student writing, but one of the main objectives for having students put their ideas and understanding in writing is to give them practice for future jobs, assessments, and other classes.
One thing that the Fulwiler reading helped me realize is the value of constructive feedback when assessing student work, especially writing. I usually leave questions in my feedback for students to think about when they receive their work back, but I had been leaving off the constructive feedback part, which Fulwiler says is vital in terms of developing student confidence in heir writing.
I have been practicing giving constructive feedback on writing assessments for the past two weeks and the response form students has been very positive. By leaving specific and constructive feedback, there is no longer the confusion of why students got a certain grade. They have concrete evidence as to why I assessed them the way I did and they have things to think about for the next time they submit their written work, or re-submit for a higher grade.
NASA is saying that the Mars rover, Curiosity, has not found the building blocks of martian life, although there was speculation that the director of the project had told a reporter that the data from the rover would be “one for the history books.” This would be a good example of scientists using a definition of the building blocks of life to search for life elsewhere in our solar system.
Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/science/space/nasa-plays-down-mars-speculation.html?ref=science&_r=0
Black holes have always always intrigued me. I think that there is something fascinating about the fact that we are so small in the scheme of things, and the idea that there are black holes at the centers of galaxies only makes space even more intriguing. Scientists recently found a super-giant black hole at the center of a far galaxy that they have found accounts for 59% of the galaxy’s mass! To put that in comparison, the galaxy believed to be at the middle of the Milky Way galaxy is only 0.1% of our galaxy’s mass. Very cool!
http://news.yahoo.com/super-giant-black-hole-baffles-scientists-174556589–abc-news-tech.html
I came across an interesting article in the New York Times that demonstrates the disconnect in the cultures of science and religion. Understandably, any time evolution comes up in school it is important to recognize that it is an accepted theory in science and students are only being asked to understand the way scientists think. This article shows the differences in the types of language that is used in science versus the common terms form everyday life.
Here is one quote from the article that shows this disconnect in language, “By allowing that evolution is a theory, scientists would hand fundamentalists the fig leaf they need to insist, at least among themselves, that the majestic words of the first chapter of Genesis are literal, not metaphorical, truths.”
Here is the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/science/biblical-literalists-clash-with-science.html?ref=science
I have two issues with the ways that I have seen labs being conducted over the course of my observations and teach experience this year. The first, and foremost, is that the majority of these labs are cookie-cutter labs. Those labs where all students have to do is follow the directions and at the end they get the result that was prescribed for them. SInce when did following directions become science? Why has the process of identifying a question and formulating a procedure to answer that question gone by the wayside? One issue is time. Current curricula that is prescribed by districts expects that students will get the concepts that they are being presented in class the first time through, which results in a curriculum that has more days planned than are reasonable. As a result, the labs become cookie-cutter, step by step, procedures that do nothing to aid in the understandings of students.
My other issue is that many of the labs currently are confirmatory instead of inquiry. This year, I can only think of one complete lab where the students were asked to formulate their own hypotheses and make predictions about what would occur based on their own prior knowledge, not what the book had given to them to read. Confirmatory labs fail to bridge the gap from conceptual learning and application to new contexts, which is what I believe they should do. In some cases they can help to spark interest or curiosity in an observed phenomenon, but in both cases they should ask students to critically think about what is being done in the lab. Not simply interpret directions.
We just finished the learning experience about cell types and parts in my class and this was a cool, interactive site that the kids used to introduce themselves to plant ad animal cells and what organelles are present within each. This built off of the previous concept of processes within the body that we had talked about in class.
Here is the link: http://www.cellsalive.com/cells/3dcell.htm
What many students, and people in general, fail to realize is that science is all around them in their lives. The activities that people and students participate in on a daily basis have direct relationships with scientific concepts that can be utilized and built upon in the science classroom.
For example, a student of mine is very interested in the human anatomy and attended the Bodies exhibit over the summer at the Puyallup Fair, but when we talked about biomolecules and how they are built and utilized in the body they were noticeably disengaged with the material. When I passed around a questionnaire asking what interests students I was shocked to find out that this students wanted to learn more about how the body worked and failed to realize that we had been talking about that very subject in class. This represents two issues. One, that I had not made a clear enough connection for that student to their real-world; and two, the student had failed to take the content and relate it to their own real world.
So how can educators bring in these everyday experiences of students into the classroom in order to increase the engagement of students and create new connections between content?
One thing is evident to me when I talk to students about what interests them, and that is the fact that the students have already experienced that “sparking of interest” moment which pulls students towards a wanting to better understand topics or concepts. It would be ignorant if I refused to draw upon and utilize these topics that have already sparked interest in my students, but it is important to find creative ways to bring student interests into my classroom. One way to do this could be through a student questionnaire at the beginning of the year. The questionnaire that I gave about two months into the school year gave me important information that would have proven even more valuable at the beginning of the year. Another possible way would be to create an assignment where students look at their daily lives and try to form connections with science on their own and then share those experiences with their classmates. This exercise could greatly increase student understanding of how their daily lives are influenced by science.
However teachers choose to pull in student interest into their classrooms, it is vitally important that educators allow students to express their excitement with scientific content.
Andrew's Science Blog 