Skip to main content

EdCamp Still Rules

  Looking Back at 10 years of EdCamps Oh how the time flies, EdCamp Madison is turning 10 this year!  It will be held Saturday, February 3rd at Sun Prairie West High School. Which can be found at 2850 Ironwood Drive in Sun Prairie Wisconsin from 8:30 am - 3:00 pm.  Get more information and register here: https://sites.google.com/sunprairieschools.org/edcampmadwi/home   I will always remember sitting in my first EdCamp opening session at the very first EdCamp Madison and having no clue what I was in for. So, I’d like to take this space to go over some of the basic rules of EdCamp. No One Will Pitch It for You EdCamps are unconferences. By this I mean that they have a blank slate of sessions for the day. There may be a few predetermined sessions, but ultimately the session topics are determined by attendees during the pitch & plan session that opens the day. If an idea gets pitched there will be a session on it. If a topic doesn’t get pitched, there won’t be a session on it. So, it i

Performance Data PBL vs. Traditional

When making changes to our instruction, educators need to know if these changes are leading them in the right direction.  Sometimes this data is hard to come by. But, responsible educators need to look for any signs they can face going the wrong way too fast.







The 2013-14 school year was my initial implementation of project based learning in the classroom.  I have lots of anecdotal and qualitative observations of student achievement that tell me I am going the right way with my curriculum redesign.  It is still important, though, to have some quantitative data to back up my decision to stay the course with PBL.


Following the completion of term 3, I administered a test to 51 students in the project based setting and 29 students in the traditional setting.  The test measured mastery of 7 key physics objectives taught during term 3.  The test was given 3 weeks into term 4.  Students were given no prior warning to the term.  This means there was no chance to prepare for the test by any student.  The test was intended to measure retention of knowledge rather than studying that could have been done prior.  The table below shows percentages of students who proved mastery of each objective.  The table also indicates the percent of students who were proficient or advanced in a particular objective.



Objective 1
Objective 2
Objective 3
Objective 4
Objective 5
Objective 6
Objective 7
Traditional% Mastery
93
31
69
20
97
66
79
Traditional% Proficient or Advanced
86
17
45
0
66
34
38
Project Based % Mastery
96
76
78
39
90
67
92
Project Based % Proficient or Advanced
57
53
53
2
76
35
61


The table indicates that in most areas, the project based students showed slightly higher levels of mastery and proficiency.  It is a bit disconcerting to realize the low level of mastery for objective 4 (Newton’s 2nd Law of Motion).  


It’s tough to gain a full picture of the gains of the project based students by taking a written test.  The goal of the curriculum was to help students apply knowledge.  So, perhaps in the future I could design a more authentic form of assessment and administer it to traditional and nontraditional settings.  It is encouraging to see that students in the project based setting did not show significant gaps when compared to students in the traditional setting in terms of content acquisition or test taking skills.


The following data represents testing done at the end of term 4 without prior notice So again, no time to study in preparation.  Also, no formulas given for any calculations.  The assessment included a total of 13 objectives from both the first term of the course and objectives from the final term of the course (some objectives were omitted because they did not lend themselves to this form of testing).


Objective
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
Traditional% Mastery
92
26
67
21
80
62
67
63
67
79
37
88
83
Traditional% Proficient or Advanced
71
13
46
0
67
33
29
42
38
62
8
55
62
Project Based % Mastery
94
61
69
59
84
80
86
88
82
92
51
73
73
Project Based % Proficient or Advanced
84
33
33
16
47
51
53
67
59
75
20
59
39


In the first 12 objectives tested, one can see that the project based students showed similar or greater mastery than those students in the traditional setting.  The one objective where we see the traditional course scores are significantly higher is the last unit of the year.  This can be attributed to the fact that in the project based classroom, we ran into a time crunch at the end of the year.  Because of this we were not able to delve into the depth of a full project.  In the project based course, we investigate each topic in more depth which requires more time, so we had less time to deal with the topics in our final unit when compared to the traditional setting.  Now that I have had the opportunity to teach the course all the way through, I believe that this issue can be resolved in the future with a keener eye to pacing.


At the end of this school year, I administered the same final exam to my 2013-14 honors physics students that was administered to the 2014-15 honors students.  The table that follows reports the mean score for both schools years.  I feel that it is not entirely valid to make a direct comparison between the two scores because of the many variables that surrounded the testing.  In the 2013-14 school year, this exam was 20% of the student’s grade and we reviewed concepts in class for two days prior to the exam.  In addition students were assigned an exam review packet to help prepare.  In the 2014-15 school year, this assessment was not a part of the student grade.  For this year’s students, they completed a portfolio rather than a paper and pencil final exam.  In addition, there was no time in class focused on a review.  This time was dedicated to work on the student portfolio.


Having said this, I think the results are quite telling about the learning going on in the project based setting.  I took the curve from the 2013-14 exam and applied it to the test taken by the honors physics student in the 2014-15 school year.  The fact that there is only a 6% difference in the scores shocks me. These results show that the know the material without having to study.  The knowledge has been learned not simply memorized.  The PBL students were given no time in class to review or forewarning about this assessment as opposed to the traditional students who were given dedicated time to study and review materials.  Just as important though, the students took this opportunity seriously as a way to defend the project based learning experience.  They knew that the results would be used as evidence to support the use of PBL in the classroom.  Their excellent performance on the assessment show that the students take pride in their work.  I can help but feel the results are a validation of the PBL method I have used this year.


Results


Year
Mean Score
2013-14 (traditional)
92%
2014-15 (Project based)
86%

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Twitter Cards for Blogger

So, I’ve been seeing people with beautiful Twitter Cards in my Twitter Stream. They make it clear that there is a web page to visit and give a quick preview of what would be found. Something like the one below: I’ve been wondering how to get one of the cards to appear when I tweet out a link to my latest blog post.  Since I use Blogger, there is not a simple button to click to turn this on.  I had to find a way to paste new code into the HTML code of my blog.  It took some searching from multiple sites to get a completely functional.   This site though was quite helpful.  But, I’d like to walk you through my process and hopefully it helps a few out. There are a few types of Twitter Cards.  Two that at most frequently see are the basic summary card and the summary card with large image.  Below you can see the layout of each, but realize that they both have the same content pieces. This is going to look like a lot more work than it will actually be

Pear Deck 101 + Q&A

  Last week, I presented as a part of Pear Deck’s Pear Fair 2020. My presentation was Pear Deck 101 for Google Slides. During the presentation, there was a live chat. Many people said it went too fast for a 101 Session. Luckily, it was recorded so it can be rewatched.  Also, many said that they wanted to know how to build a Pear Deck first. I structured the presentation to show what Pear Deck was before showing how to make one. Perhaps that wasn’t the best structure. But, I’m going to stick with my philosophy of showing what something is before showing how to make it. The presentation, which can be watched below, was structured in several different sections What is Pear Deck? Providing an overview of the experience from the Teacher and Student perspectives. How do you build a Pear Deck in Google Slides? How do you start a Pear Deck presentation? How do you end a Pear Deck presentation? Here is the Slideshow I shared during the session bit.ly/pearfair101 Time really flew in the sess

Using Infinite Campus to Give Grades Meaning

At Brookfield Central High School have just passed the three week grading period and are approaching the first parent teacher conferences of the year. My thoughts are turning to clarifying my grading practices to students and parents as more scores are being entered into the gradebook.  I have completely restructured the grade reporting in my online gradebook this year.  This was due to struggles I had last year in trying to implement what I believe to be best grading practices into my grade reporting.  Much of my grading philosophy has been informed by Robert Marzano and Marzano Research, specifically the wonderful book Classroom Assessment & Grading that Works .   Traditionally, as I prepare for teacher conferences, I use a student summary report I print from our online gradebook to guide the discussion with parents.  Our grading program in my district is Infinite Campus (IC).  I really like the software and find it extremely easy to use.  Below you’ll see a sample st