Analysis (cont.)
The review activities tied in many multiple activities into one activity and seemed to be successful at getting students to retain the content material, however I was also interested in tying in many multiple intelligences into the regular classroom, and not as a review activity.
In Artifact 10—Net Ionic Equation Posters, many of the multiple intelligences and forms of differentiation were used; “ This activity was differentiated in many different ways: the visual intelligence was included as the students had to make a visual of the problem they were presenting, the inter-personal intelligence was played on, as students were working in groups to create these posters, the auditory intelligence was used when students were both giving and listening to others presentations, and the logical-mathematical intelligence was used in actually solving the problem (in red, Artifact 10 Analysis).”
Though the class average on the posters was a 100% (Artifact 10.3), on the quizzes that students took the day afterwards that covered the exact same material as was in the posters, they scored an average of 69.7% (Artifact 10.4), which is very low for this class, and indicates that they did not retain the content knowledge. What was even more perplexing was that when the students were surveyed on whether the posters helped them to learn the material, they said that creating these posters helped them to review the content material. What went wrong in this activity?
Though it seemed like students were engaged in the task and they did really well on their posters, I think that the content material may have had an effect here. In both Artifacts 4 and 8, which also used many different multiple intelligences, there was only one topic that was being covered by the activity, while as the net ionic equation posters covered three in total—balancing equations, total ionic equations, and net ionic equations, all of which are highly interconnected. As mentioned previously, content material that is highly inter-connected is harder to learn than content material that is not (Sweller, 1994). This leads me to believe that the amount of topics covered in an activity may also affect how well students retain it (see Artifact 10 Analysis for more details).
In Artifact 10—Net Ionic Equation Posters, many of the multiple intelligences and forms of differentiation were used; “ This activity was differentiated in many different ways: the visual intelligence was included as the students had to make a visual of the problem they were presenting, the inter-personal intelligence was played on, as students were working in groups to create these posters, the auditory intelligence was used when students were both giving and listening to others presentations, and the logical-mathematical intelligence was used in actually solving the problem (in red, Artifact 10 Analysis).”
Though the class average on the posters was a 100% (Artifact 10.3), on the quizzes that students took the day afterwards that covered the exact same material as was in the posters, they scored an average of 69.7% (Artifact 10.4), which is very low for this class, and indicates that they did not retain the content knowledge. What was even more perplexing was that when the students were surveyed on whether the posters helped them to learn the material, they said that creating these posters helped them to review the content material. What went wrong in this activity?
Though it seemed like students were engaged in the task and they did really well on their posters, I think that the content material may have had an effect here. In both Artifacts 4 and 8, which also used many different multiple intelligences, there was only one topic that was being covered by the activity, while as the net ionic equation posters covered three in total—balancing equations, total ionic equations, and net ionic equations, all of which are highly interconnected. As mentioned previously, content material that is highly inter-connected is harder to learn than content material that is not (Sweller, 1994). This leads me to believe that the amount of topics covered in an activity may also affect how well students retain it (see Artifact 10 Analysis for more details).