Alpa Khandar

Well I’m in Florida - that’s the good part.  The bad part is that my family has spent the last three days in bed feverish with the flu.  I can’t remember the last time I had a fever.  Today is Wednesday and we are feeling just a little bit better and certainly ready to start our vacation.  Luckily we are staying with my in-laws and have help with the kids.  While I can get myself out of bed I’ve been trying to work on my action research.  I’ve entered my data and have been figuring out the best ways to represent my data.  I’ve also been trying to read some literature and summarize the articles.  Every time I try to reread the Sandoval and Reiser article my fever spikes.  Could they possibly use the word epistemic any more?  And what does it mean anyway?  Everything is taking much longer than I expected.  But if I don’t get a draft done by the end of the week - I won’t have any time to work next week  - so I have to make some progress now.  I am certainly gaining respect for the process of research!

I was excited to find a good way to use the concept map today in class.  We have the bubbles coming off of the word chemistry in two different colors.  The green bubbles represent topics we consider to be “foundations” of chemistry and the blue bubbles are the topics we called “applications” of chemistry.  We are starting to study the applications now, so I asked students to help summarize what they learned in the first half of the course (in the green bubbles), and as a class we generated a bunch of stuff that we know about the atom, the periodic table, bonding, and stoichiometry.  I found it really helpful to tell the students that the knowledge they shared is their foundation of chemistry and now they are ready to figure out what all of this means.  I really liked how that worked.

I am worried about how I’m going to get everything done in the time frame we have.  I also have other major time committments during March (teaching my first staff development course over 3 Saturdays and finishing organic chemistry with my IB students and completing all the paperwork IB requires for the “internal assessment”).  I know I’ll get everything done, the question is can I do it all well?  I’m also going away to Florida for ten days over February break - so I definitely need a plan to so I can actually enjoy Florida and not feel guilty about sitting at the beach. 

I’d like to finish most of the data tabulating before I leave for Florida which means tonight and tomorrow evening.   I’m going to aim for having a draft done while in Florida if possible so that will give me time the following week to edit.  We’ll see from there.

Looking over the surveys, we found several themes that students wrote about when they commented on how their lab experience with the open-ended lab differed from their previous lab experiences.

The themes included:  independence, understanding, decision-making, choice, not enough time, enjoyed, didn’t enjoy, confusion, no difference, harder, and more thinking.

After gathering data from the lab reports reports regarding understanding, we’ll be able to add data from the student comments to get a richer picture of what their experiences were.  What I’m working on now is to make sure I have appropriate literature to review.  I found four articles from our class that I think will be relevant, the Barbara Crawford article, two articles from Mark Windshitl, and the Sandoval and Reiser article.  Is that sufficient, or should I do more searching?

Sarah and I took some time over the weekend to look at the data we have gathered and to rethink our research question.  After looking at the data we have gathered and taking input from Vince and Eric from last class, we had to decide what question we are really able to answer.  What we decided we can best answer is . . . .

How did changing the lab from prescriptive to open-ended affect student understanding?

And so the next question of course is, how will we measure student understanding?  We decided to look at the lab reports that students wrote for the open ended lab and check for three things:

1.  Did the wording of each student’s conclusion answer his/her research question?

2.  Did each student choose to measure and calculate a quantity that appropriately answers his/her research question?

3.  Was the student able to calculate correctly?

In addition to examing the labs, we will tabulate data from surveys that students answered both before and after the open-ended lab experience.  We will compare frequency of answers as well as tabulate comments by coding under repetetive themes that we see.

April and Liz came  to observe a lesson where I was finishing up a vapor pressure lesson and setting up the class for a solubility lab.  The lesson was tied in to the action research because the students were being asked to think about a lab without being given all the information they normally would.  For this lab, students were provided a handout without a procedure and they had to think about the specifics of the steps they’ll need to follow. 

I think that the debriefing was surprisingly insightful and helpful.  What was the most interesting to me is that following any observation I’ve had with an administrator - what we discuss is the lesson plan - were objectives clearly set, how did you use group work, were the instructions clear, did you have closure, etc.   Not that those aren’t valuable elements of a lesson - but with April and Liz we discussed very different elements such as community of learners, student ownership, and depth of knowledge.  The lens that April and Liz used to examined the lesson were so much deeper in getting at what we are trying to teach and I really appreciated that.  Definitely gives me thoughts for the future.

Sarah and I met with Vince and Eric today in class to discuss the data we have gathered. Our question started out sounding something like “how does changing the lab affect student autonomy, affect, and understanding?” Our group helped us understand that this is a really broad question. For example, what does “changing the lab” even mean? Looking at my previous post I see that what I thought it meant was changing the lab from prescriptive to open-ended. So that is better, more specific. We also realized that the only data we have to measure student autonomy and affect is based on the student surveys. Autonomy would have been great to measure if we had previous decided on key characteristics of autonomy and then looked for them when we observed our kids. So I think autonomy is out as far a measurable outcome. Affect is still measurable based on the student surveys. The best thing that we can measure by looking at their lab reports is student understanding. Eric pushed us to look at specific areas within the lab report. Sarah’s suggestion is to look specifically at the calculations and conclusion areas of the lab, which sounds good to me. I am thinking possibly of looking at if the calculations and conclusion answer their research questions to measure student understanding.

First - let me say that as hard as it is to fit this class in with life’s other responsibilities, I am so happy to spend every other Tuesday in the company of other science teachers who care about what I care about. 

Through all the blogging and self-reflection that we’ve been doing, it has really been helpful to figure out what the “next thing” is that I want to work on.  And in this case, that meant writing defining an area of focus and writing a plan only to realize that’s not the plan I want to work on for now.  There’s always so many aspects of our teaching that we care to improve, right?  So I had to write the action research plan I thought I wanted to work on to realize that’s not what I want to work on.  Well, I do - but it’s not what I want to focus my research on. 

Sarah and I got together a few days before we submitted our plan and had a good discussion.  We felt we’re already working on our curriculum, our unit plan, our projects, but we talked about what we’re not working on that we really need to think more about.  We realized we start the year with such hope and optimism of how we want our students to be scientists in our classroom.  Our instruction, our projects, and using authentic problems all help in engaging students and motivating students.  BUT, if we want them to be self-directed and act like scientists - we felt we needed to think more about our lab time.  We want to think about how we define and present the lab, how much flexibility we give the students, how much time students have to write and discuss their results, and other similar thoughts.  We’d love to half the amount of labs we do for better quality. 

We know which lab we will use to gather our research, and we’re narrowing down the data we will gather.  Our research question is now, “How does changing the lab presentation from prescriptive to open-ended affect student autonomy?”

ACTION RESEARCH PLAN

1. Write an area-of-focus statement.

The purpose of this study is to…

Align current instruction with existing unit projects and a real-world authentic problem and study how this impacts my students.

2. Explain its connection to reform-based science education.

This study attempts to addresses the following central aspects of reform-based science education:

Teaching science in a context that is real to the field of science, the disciplinary nature of science.

3. Define your variables.

4. Develop research questions.

How does situating instruction in authentic problems impact students’

1. understanding of the unit of study?

2. understanding of core concepts in the unit?

3. understanding of the nature of science?

3. perception of relevance?

4. affect for chemistry?

Describe the intervention or innovations.

I will…

Create two units and modify existing literacy projects so that they are aligned with an authentic problem.

5. Describe the membership of the action research group.

I will be working with Sarah to collaborate on data collection, analysis, and reporting. We will each analyze two to three areas that we are studying.

6. Describe negotiations that need to be undertaken.

Permissions needed from administrators? Parents? Students? Colleagues?

Not sure if there are any. Perhaps from students.

7. Develop a timeline.

Phase 1 (August – November). Identify area of focus, review related literature, develop research questions, and reconnaissance.

Phase 2 (January/ February) Implement changes in two units and Collect Data

Phase 3 (March) Analyze Data

Phase 4 (March/April) Report on Action Research

(Note: The main effort should be implemented in February, 2008).

8. Develop a statement of resources.

not sure

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

_____________________ _____________________

9. Develop data collection ideas.

(If you have drafts of surveys, interview protocols, etc., please attach them.)

Design surveys, conduct interviews, analyze test data, and analyze reflection sheets from the literacy projects.

10. Describe your intentions or hopes for publication.

Not sure

Our students just handed in their second literacy projects. The first projects were about atomic structure, and the most recent ones were on the periodic table. It was nice to see most of the students hand in their projects (ranging from 19 to 23 out of 25 students). Also, Sarah had the idea for the students to collect their work in a portfolio for which she made a nice cover sheet and a reflection sheet for each project. In their reflection, students need to write a short summary of their work and also what they learned that they believe made them more “scientifically literate.” I think these reflection sheets will turn out to be a good way to collect data.

Something that worked much better for me this year is taking more class time for the projects. Students had time after the unit test to work on their project in the computer lab. Also, they had class time the day the projects were returned to do their reflection sheets and work on their portfolio. Finally, the day the second projects were due we were able to share and talk about what we did, and students who made video projects played their work.

I don’t believe they’ve fully grasped the purpose of the projects yet, but they seem to be buying into them and I think spending more class time rather than having all the work done on their own time has made a significant difference.