TE 804 Name:
APPLICATION TEACHING INVESTIGATION REPORT
Purpose
The purpose of this assignment is to use data, especially embedded assessment, to analyze your work. You will not be graded on how well your students did on assessment tasks, but how well you use these data to improve your teaching.
Objective
Copy the objective that was the focus of your activity cycle.
Story of What Happened
Write approximately one page (roughly one paragraph per stage of the activity cycle) describing what happened during your teaching investigation. Aim for a coherent description of how the activities affected students’ understanding. You should include what you did, what the students did, and how they reacted, plus a summary of what they learned. You will provide a more detailed analysis of the student work in the next section. This is where you include your video data and your mentor and/or field instructor’s observations. Below is a sample paragraph describing a hypothetical modeling stage.
“For the modeling stage, I did a demonstration of mountain building. I explained that this was a simulation that would explain the EP questions of why the Himalayas are growing and what you would find if you tunneled deep under them. I had a row of wooden blocks floating in water in a large aquarium representing continental crusts. I pushed the blocks together and after I moved them up and down a bit, the blocks stacked up on each other. I got pretty wet doing the demo which the students liked. I asked the students to draw a before and after picture of what they saw and label it as though it were plates rather than wood. Many of them included me in the pictures. Very few students indicated that my pushing on the block was supposed to simulate converging plates. My mentor and I both found that as students were drawing the pictures they were very engaged, but were not making the connections to plate tectonics.”
Checklist
· Is your story coherent?
· Does it include the students’ actions as well as yours?
· Does your story include a description of students’ ideas?
· Is each stage clearly described?
· Is the link between stages apparent?
Analysis of Student Work
For each phase of the activity cycle, briefly describe the assessment activity, the ideal (but reasonable) response, and a summary of the patterns in the actual responses. Finally explain what the student responses told you about: 1) the efficacy of your scaffolding, 2) what you need to adjust in the following lesson(s), and 3) adjustments you would need to make when repeating this activity.
Checklist
· Is the ideal response reasonable, e.g. is it something that students of this age and experience could produce?
· Is the summary of the actual responses detailed enough that specific inferences can be drawn from it?
· Is the analysis of the scaffolding supported by the data?
· Were the adjustments to subsequent lessons appropriate given the data?
· Are the proposed changes to the activity justified by the data?
Establish a Problem
Embedded assessment activity:
Ideal response:
Summary of patterns in actual responses:
Analysis of efficacy of scaffolding:
What you adjusted in subsequent lessons: (If everything went exactly as planned, describe to what you attribute the success.}
How you would adjust this activity next time you do it:
Model
Embedded assessment activity:
Ideal response:
Summary of patterns in actual responses:
Analysis of efficacy of scaffolding:
What you adjusted in subsequent lessons: (If everything went exactly as planned, describe to what you attribute the success.}
How you would adjust this activity next time you do it:
Coach
Embedded assessment activity:
Ideal response:
Summary of patterns in actual responses:
Analysis of efficacy of scaffolding:
What you adjusted in subsequent lessons: (If everything went exactly as planned, describe to what you attribute the success.}
How you would adjust this activity next time you do it:
Fade
Embedded assessment activity:
Ideal response:
Summary of patterns in actual responses:
Analysis of efficacy of scaffolding:
What you adjusted in subsequent lessons: (If everything went exactly as planned, describe to what you attribute the success.}
How you would adjust this activity next time you do it:
Lessons Learned
Scaffolding
Describe one important lesson you learned about how to scaffold students’ learning.
Embedded Assessment
Describe one important lesson you learned about embedded assessment. It can be about how to write useful embedded assessment or ways to adjust lessons based on the results of embedded assessment.
Checklist
· Do the lessons learned follow from the analysis?
· Are they significant ideas that are not obvious?