The Science Learnification (Almost) Weekly – June 19, 2011

This is a collection of things that tickled my science education fancy in the past couple of weeks or so.

Reflections on Standards-Based Grading

Lots of end-of-year reflections from SBG implementers

• SBG with voice revisions – Andy Rundquist only accepts (re)assessments where he can hear the student’s voice. When they hand in a problem solution, it basically has to be a screencast or pencast (livescribe pen) submission. The post is his reflections on what worked, what didn’t and what to do next time.
• Standards-Based Feedback and SBG Reflections – Bret Benesh has two SBG-posts one after the other. I was especially fond of the one on Standards-Based Feedback where he proposes that students would not receive standards-based grades throughout the term but would instead produce a portfolio of their work which best showed their mastery for each standard. This one got my mind racing and my fingers typing.
• A Small Tweak and a Feedback Inequality – Dan Anderson posts about providing feedback-only on the first assessment in nerd form: Feedback > Feedback + Grade > Grade. This is his take on the same issue which lead Bret Benesh to thinking about Standards-Based Feedback, when there is a grade and feedback provided, the students focus all their attention on the grade. He also has a neat system of calculating the final score for an assessments.
• Reflections on SBG – Roger Wistar (computer science teacher) discusses his SBG journey and the good and bad of his experience so far.

Modeling

• Modeling Workshop: Week 1 (Fear and Respect The Hestenes) – Shawn Cornally tells us about his first week at a summer modeling workshop and he seems to be loving it.

Flipped classrooms and screencasting

• Lecturing, Screencasting, Flipped Classrooms – Mylene posts some thoughts about lecturing after attending a recent webinar on flipped classrooms. Great conversation ensues in the comments.
• How I make screencasts: The whiteboard screencast – Robert Talbert continues on with his how-to screencast series.

Peer Instruction

• Why should I use peer instruction in my class? – Peter uses  a study on student (non)learning from video by the Kansas State Physics Education Research Group to help answer this question. The short answer is “Because they give the students and you to ability to assess the current level of understanding of the concepts. Current, right now, before it’s too late and the house of cards you’re so carefully building come crashing down.”

The tale of sciencegeekgirl’s career

• How a Scientist Became a Freelance Science Writer – Stephanie Chasteen (sciencegeekgirl) talks about how she earned her physics PhD while also developing as a science writer.

Getting them to do stuff they are interested in

• The Future of Education Without Coercion (Video) – Shawn Cornally (Think Thank Thunk blog) talks about how to rethink what exactly productive student work is. And it all starts with getting them to do stuff that they’re interested in.
• Angry Birds in the Physics Classroom – Speaking of things most people are interested in, Frank Noschese posts about some physics-based investigations students can do using Angry Birds.

John Burk gets busy

• John Burk (Quantum Progress blog) has been a very busy blogger over the past couple of weeks. Highlights include a couple of Rhett Allain-esque Google doodle analyses (here and here), some Arduino fun (stay tuned for my post on DAQ systems which includes arduino), “The time has come to stop playing defense and change education” (let’s not just sit there and criticize Khan Academy, let’s go out and show what can be done that is better), and a first vPython assignment for high school students.

---