Artifact 10 Analysis
Context:
Students had been learning about balancing equations, ionic equations, and net ionic equations, so to synthesize the three of them, I divided the students up into groups and gave each group an equation that they had to balance and write out the total and net ionic equations for. They then had to present these pieces of information on a poster and present that poster to the rest of the class in mini-presentations. After students had finished this, I gave them a survey that consisted of two questions:
The day after the presentations, they had a quiz on those three topics. Therefore, this artifact consists of three pieces:
Artifact Analysis/Relation to Focus of Inquiry:
This activity was really interesting, because it seemed like students learned a lot from it. 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 the surveys, 21 out of the 27 people surveyed said that making the posters helped them to understand the material, citing reasons such as “…[because] the process was broken down…,” “…[because it] clarified balancing and criss-cross…,”and “…[because] my peers correct me when I do the wrong thing…” Furthermore, 18 people out of the 27 surveyed said that the peer presentations helped them to learn the material, mostly giving the reason that their peers explained it well. These results would support that these net ionic posters and the peer presentations helped most people to retain the content knowledge.
However, what was interesting was that while these results indicate that the net ionic posters did help increase content retention, the quiz results do not say the same. The average on the quiz was a 69.7%, 50% of the class got a D or below, and only 5 people got an A. This is a very low average for this class (normally they average around an 80%), which indicates that they did not retain the content material very well. Not only this, but their perception of the retention was different than what they actually retained. This leads me to wonder about student perception of retention—do they know when they know the material?
Furthermore, this indicates that using many multiple intelligences to differentiate instruction is not always effective—in this case, 4 of the multiple intelligences were somehow tied into this activity, yet the students did not retain the material very well. Why is it that sometimes using many multiple intelligences works and others it doesn’t?
This may also be related to the actual content material at hand—students may be hindered in their retention by the degree of difficulty of the material. These three concepts—balancing equations, total ionic equations, and net ionic equations, and hard topics for students to grasp, which may be why using many forms of differentiation at once may not be effective. Does differentiation need to change with the degree of difficulty of the topic? In other words, should harder topics be taught with just one level of differentiation at a time, instead of four at once to make the topic clearer for the students?
Dimension of Teaching and Learning: Students as Teachers and Learners
When I assigned this activity, I assumed that students would get more out of hearing their peers deliver the information that hearing me deliver the information, because they’ve heard what I have to say several times, and they may need to hear the information in a different manner. This is because I know I always learned the material best when I heard someone who “spoke my language” taught it to me, and my students have also re-iterated the same idea to me. I also thought that by working with their peers on these problems, that they would understand how to do them better, and be able to synthesize how the three concepts are related. However, though they said that it helped, it didn’t seem to help them that much based on the quiz scores. This leads me to have to re-think the way that I teach material, and also to reconsider what students says that they know, because as this activity has demonstrated, that is not always what they actually do know.
Implications for Future Teaching:
In the future, I would thus like to focus mainly on quiz scores to determine retention, and actual work that students have made to make assumptions based on retention, as this data showed that students do not always know what they know.
Students had been learning about balancing equations, ionic equations, and net ionic equations, so to synthesize the three of them, I divided the students up into groups and gave each group an equation that they had to balance and write out the total and net ionic equations for. They then had to present these pieces of information on a poster and present that poster to the rest of the class in mini-presentations. After students had finished this, I gave them a survey that consisted of two questions:
- Did making the posters help you to understand the material?
- Did your peers presentations help you to understand how to write net ionic equations?
The day after the presentations, they had a quiz on those three topics. Therefore, this artifact consists of three pieces:
Artifact Analysis/Relation to Focus of Inquiry:
This activity was really interesting, because it seemed like students learned a lot from it. 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 the surveys, 21 out of the 27 people surveyed said that making the posters helped them to understand the material, citing reasons such as “…[because] the process was broken down…,” “…[because it] clarified balancing and criss-cross…,”and “…[because] my peers correct me when I do the wrong thing…” Furthermore, 18 people out of the 27 surveyed said that the peer presentations helped them to learn the material, mostly giving the reason that their peers explained it well. These results would support that these net ionic posters and the peer presentations helped most people to retain the content knowledge.
However, what was interesting was that while these results indicate that the net ionic posters did help increase content retention, the quiz results do not say the same. The average on the quiz was a 69.7%, 50% of the class got a D or below, and only 5 people got an A. This is a very low average for this class (normally they average around an 80%), which indicates that they did not retain the content material very well. Not only this, but their perception of the retention was different than what they actually retained. This leads me to wonder about student perception of retention—do they know when they know the material?
Furthermore, this indicates that using many multiple intelligences to differentiate instruction is not always effective—in this case, 4 of the multiple intelligences were somehow tied into this activity, yet the students did not retain the material very well. Why is it that sometimes using many multiple intelligences works and others it doesn’t?
This may also be related to the actual content material at hand—students may be hindered in their retention by the degree of difficulty of the material. These three concepts—balancing equations, total ionic equations, and net ionic equations, and hard topics for students to grasp, which may be why using many forms of differentiation at once may not be effective. Does differentiation need to change with the degree of difficulty of the topic? In other words, should harder topics be taught with just one level of differentiation at a time, instead of four at once to make the topic clearer for the students?
Dimension of Teaching and Learning: Students as Teachers and Learners
When I assigned this activity, I assumed that students would get more out of hearing their peers deliver the information that hearing me deliver the information, because they’ve heard what I have to say several times, and they may need to hear the information in a different manner. This is because I know I always learned the material best when I heard someone who “spoke my language” taught it to me, and my students have also re-iterated the same idea to me. I also thought that by working with their peers on these problems, that they would understand how to do them better, and be able to synthesize how the three concepts are related. However, though they said that it helped, it didn’t seem to help them that much based on the quiz scores. This leads me to have to re-think the way that I teach material, and also to reconsider what students says that they know, because as this activity has demonstrated, that is not always what they actually do know.
Implications for Future Teaching:
In the future, I would thus like to focus mainly on quiz scores to determine retention, and actual work that students have made to make assumptions based on retention, as this data showed that students do not always know what they know.