I'm conducting a little informal study of students' study habits as they relate to a midterm exam that is coming up in about 3 weeks. The exam is cumulative, spanning all the topics we have covered this year except natural selection.*
My advice to the students is to study a little each day (15 minutes or so), starting now, outside of any class time that I might give them to get prepared. They have packets of notes, old study guides, and most importantly, a set of flashcards that I devised for them.
As part of their daily "do now" assignment, I had them create a study log, so that each day I can now ask them how much time they spent studying the night (or weekend) before and what kind of studying they did - review flashcards, write/organize notes, do homework, etc. I tried to emphasize that the information would not be used for grading purposes, that it will not help them or me to be dishonest, and that honesty would not harm them - except of course that if they don't study they likely will be harmed by not performing well on the test - but that's not about the honesty issue. I further stated, just to be safe, that if keeping the log actually encourages them to study more, then that's a good thing. They don't need to worry that it will mess up my research if they study more now than they normally would have!
Obviously what I will be looking for here is a correlation between study habits and scores on the exam. I will choose questions that are more or less directly modeled on the flashcards, using slightly different diagrams and wordings from old regents exams. This levels the playing field somewhat in terms of what I discussed previously as the "IQ" portion of the regents exam. I will be testing what students have been taught and what they are responsible for studying.
I may get some interesting results. Based on Willingham's idea that the more you know the easier it is to learn more, I suspect a reasonable number of high scores on the exam will show very little study time. Many high performing students pay attention in class, get the concepts from the instruction, and assimilate it rapidly with little need for study time outside of class. I do expect those individual to be outliers and hope that I can show a more general trend where study time correlates to scores. Unfortunately, I also expect to see outliers on the other end of the spectrum, - those students who report a lot of study time and still get low scores. At least that will give me a target audience for some interventions before June comes around.
*I taught natural selection superficially in the beginning of the year and decided to keep it off the midterm - most of the regents questions relating to evolution are embedded with questions about genetics, heredity, or ecology that we haven't covered yet.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Monday, February 15, 2010
Science Test or IQ Test?
I've been going through old regents exams and pulling out images to make flashcards (which I will post when they are finished). I've got about 500 100 images now, but some of them are more or less duplicates that I have to weed out. Going through the multitude of different diagrams and models is getting me a little frustrated about the state of science education and education in general.
One of Willingham's chapters deals with the process of transfer of knowledge. Using knowledge of how Scenario A works can help us figure out how an analogous Scenario B works - if we recognize the two scenarios as analogous, which isn't always so easy. It requires a deep understanding of the underling structures of Scenario A. I'll illustrate the point with the following two images from old regents exams.
This is an energy pyramid.* It shows a producer level (A) followed by primary (B), secondary (C), and tertiary (D) consumers. There are several statements we can make about the pyramid. A might represent plants, which are eaten by B, herbivores, which can be eaten by C, omnivores or carnivores, which can in turn be eaten by D, other carnivores. We can say that D depends on C, which depends on B, which depends on A (which depends on the sun and inorganic substances from the environment, not represented in the diagram). Using basic logic, then, we can say that D and C depend indirectly on A. We could also say that D depends indirectly on the sun and so on.
Finally (for now) we can say that there will always be more energy available at the A level than the B level in a stable ecosystem. More energy at the B level than the C level. More energy at the C level than the D level. The reason for this phenomenon is that organisms do not store all the (food) energy they consume from the level below them. Instead, they use it for their survival needs - staying alive burns energy, so that every step up the pyramid, the energy consumed is lost as heat (when animals use energy, it is transformed into low-grade, useless heat that is lost to the environment).
If your an educated adult reading this and your head is spinning already, imagine what this must do to the the kids. We do spend some time teaching these concepts and using more concrete examples - so we might use grasses at level A, then a grasshopper to represent level B, a frog for level C, and a snake to represent D. Still, for most kids this is a lot of abstraction and they are likely to come away with relatively shallow understanding (they haven't had physics or chemistry and heat is not so easy to grasp), but if they see the energy pyramid on an exam they will at least have some idea what concepts to key into in finding an answer to whatever question might be posed about it.
Now consider the following image used to test understanding of the concept just described in an energy pyramid. What do the squiggly arrows represent? Now, I just set you up for the answer by providing you with the analogous situation, but the kids taking the exam have no such clues. Unless they were directly taught this visual model, they must somehow connect the seaweed as Level A, the small fish as level B, and so on, then remember the point of that pyramid was the loss of energy at each level, so the arrows must represent energy lost to the environment as heat.
That's a lot to expect. I remember grading the exam (June '09) with this question and pulling my hair out at how many kids got it wrong. Some of the kids after the exam told me they thought it was sperm, but sperm wasn't one of the choices! They just weren't able to transfer the knowledge. I have since incorporated this kind of model in my instruction, but really, a lot of the success on the exam depends on kids' basic reasoning skills and not necessarily knowledge of biology. A little knowledge goes a long way if you are capable of abstraction and transfer, not skills that many 9th & 10th graders possess in particular abundance.
Stronger students could have figured out the answer by eliminating the other choices, but slower students are easily overwhelmed by the language and logic necessary to use that strategy effectively. To invoke Willingham's analogy again, imagine if your first driving experience were to involve navigating through midtown Manhattan in fast moving traffic. Although the signs and signals and dangers and other cars are right in front of you, plain to see, you would have a hard time processing it all because so much information is coming at you at once. Some kids look at a regents exam and their eyes glaze over, all the words start to run together and nothing makes sense. Whole pages of easy questions near the end are left blank sometimes, the equivalent of stopping in the middle of the street, getting out of the car, and just walking away.
Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges we face is getting students to a level of deeper understanding so that they can analyze and answer questions about a particular concept that use different visual models or different language than they have been taught directly. This is no small task given the number of concepts we have to cover, the limited time (6 periods per week including lab time), and the deficiencies in both background science knowledge and general high school-level vocabulary & reading skills. There's much work to be done!
*It could also be a pyramid of biomass, which can ultimately be thought of as "energy." but the regents exam almost always presents it as a pyramid of energy.
One of Willingham's chapters deals with the process of transfer of knowledge. Using knowledge of how Scenario A works can help us figure out how an analogous Scenario B works - if we recognize the two scenarios as analogous, which isn't always so easy. It requires a deep understanding of the underling structures of Scenario A. I'll illustrate the point with the following two images from old regents exams.
This is an energy pyramid.* It shows a producer level (A) followed by primary (B), secondary (C), and tertiary (D) consumers. There are several statements we can make about the pyramid. A might represent plants, which are eaten by B, herbivores, which can be eaten by C, omnivores or carnivores, which can in turn be eaten by D, other carnivores. We can say that D depends on C, which depends on B, which depends on A (which depends on the sun and inorganic substances from the environment, not represented in the diagram). Using basic logic, then, we can say that D and C depend indirectly on A. We could also say that D depends indirectly on the sun and so on.Finally (for now) we can say that there will always be more energy available at the A level than the B level in a stable ecosystem. More energy at the B level than the C level. More energy at the C level than the D level. The reason for this phenomenon is that organisms do not store all the (food) energy they consume from the level below them. Instead, they use it for their survival needs - staying alive burns energy, so that every step up the pyramid, the energy consumed is lost as heat (when animals use energy, it is transformed into low-grade, useless heat that is lost to the environment).
If your an educated adult reading this and your head is spinning already, imagine what this must do to the the kids. We do spend some time teaching these concepts and using more concrete examples - so we might use grasses at level A, then a grasshopper to represent level B, a frog for level C, and a snake to represent D. Still, for most kids this is a lot of abstraction and they are likely to come away with relatively shallow understanding (they haven't had physics or chemistry and heat is not so easy to grasp), but if they see the energy pyramid on an exam they will at least have some idea what concepts to key into in finding an answer to whatever question might be posed about it.
Now consider the following image used to test understanding of the concept just described in an energy pyramid. What do the squiggly arrows represent? Now, I just set you up for the answer by providing you with the analogous situation, but the kids taking the exam have no such clues. Unless they were directly taught this visual model, they must somehow connect the seaweed as Level A, the small fish as level B, and so on, then remember the point of that pyramid was the loss of energy at each level, so the arrows must represent energy lost to the environment as heat.
That's a lot to expect. I remember grading the exam (June '09) with this question and pulling my hair out at how many kids got it wrong. Some of the kids after the exam told me they thought it was sperm, but sperm wasn't one of the choices! They just weren't able to transfer the knowledge. I have since incorporated this kind of model in my instruction, but really, a lot of the success on the exam depends on kids' basic reasoning skills and not necessarily knowledge of biology. A little knowledge goes a long way if you are capable of abstraction and transfer, not skills that many 9th & 10th graders possess in particular abundance.Stronger students could have figured out the answer by eliminating the other choices, but slower students are easily overwhelmed by the language and logic necessary to use that strategy effectively. To invoke Willingham's analogy again, imagine if your first driving experience were to involve navigating through midtown Manhattan in fast moving traffic. Although the signs and signals and dangers and other cars are right in front of you, plain to see, you would have a hard time processing it all because so much information is coming at you at once. Some kids look at a regents exam and their eyes glaze over, all the words start to run together and nothing makes sense. Whole pages of easy questions near the end are left blank sometimes, the equivalent of stopping in the middle of the street, getting out of the car, and just walking away.
Ultimately, one of the biggest challenges we face is getting students to a level of deeper understanding so that they can analyze and answer questions about a particular concept that use different visual models or different language than they have been taught directly. This is no small task given the number of concepts we have to cover, the limited time (6 periods per week including lab time), and the deficiencies in both background science knowledge and general high school-level vocabulary & reading skills. There's much work to be done!
*It could also be a pyramid of biomass, which can ultimately be thought of as "energy." but the regents exam almost always presents it as a pyramid of energy.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?
Technology Review: A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?
Apropos the malleability of IQ:
Mice genetically engineered to have memory problems were placed in a stimulus-rich environment, which improved their memory relative to a control group, not surprisingly.
What was rather astounding, however, is that the offspring of these mice, who inherited the genetically engineered memory gene, showed improved memory function even absent the stimulus-rich environment.
The study highlights a growing body of evidence that under certain circumstances, acquired traits can in fact be inherited without changes to the DNA sequence. The exact mechanism of this phenomenon is still not understood.
Wonder if that might explain part of the intergenerational increases in IQ that have been observed around the world?
Via Bioforum, Kim LaCelle
Apropos the malleability of IQ:
Mice genetically engineered to have memory problems were placed in a stimulus-rich environment, which improved their memory relative to a control group, not surprisingly.
What was rather astounding, however, is that the offspring of these mice, who inherited the genetically engineered memory gene, showed improved memory function even absent the stimulus-rich environment.
The study highlights a growing body of evidence that under certain circumstances, acquired traits can in fact be inherited without changes to the DNA sequence. The exact mechanism of this phenomenon is still not understood.
Wonder if that might explain part of the intergenerational increases in IQ that have been observed around the world?
Via Bioforum, Kim LaCelle
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
