Share - Reflect - Data Analysis - Writing in Science

The second intervention I did was described in my previous posts, and also in this Google Drawing:

Before and after the Sound and Light in KPop unit I gave students the same instructions:

You have 4 minutes to write an awesome paragraph about sound and light.

Below you will find the raw data and student samples of writing.

   Here is the analysis:

All of the students increased the number of words they wrote about sound and light in the four minutes.

All students except one increased their use of scientific vocabulary. Student 1 and 14 in particular made large gains.

Two out of five students increased their number of complete sentences. Student 12 wrote enormous, run-on sentences in both pre and post test.

Three out of five students increased the number of ideas they had written about in 4 minutes. One remained the same, and one student wrote about 1 less idea.

I was quite disappointed with the results from students in their end of year science test, which included a section about different sentence types. Two different lessons were spent on sentence types and practicing with them, which I conclude was not enough. I think this is incredibly important learning and should be incorporated into more of my lessons, more regularly.

However, students DID have the opportunity to revisit and revise sentence types before the exam, and knew it would be an entire section in the exam. Perhaps not all students did not have enough time to study all sections of the exam (except, some did). 

Most students could not write a Simple Sentence, and (somewhat unbelievably) most students did not even attempt a W-Start Sentence by writing a word (ANY WORD!) that started with W at the start of the sentence! I am not sure what to conclude from this.  

Share - Reflect - Data Analysis

Week two with the Year 9 SOLO learning - does the pattern continue?

Week two is about the concept of natural selection!

Here are the learning outcomes for each SOLO level:

Here's what the rangaranga maha activity looks like:

At the end of the week I gathered data using this quizizz (only 10 questions) and then plotted it against their highest level of work completion:

Next I found an average quiz score for those who completed each SOLO level:

I found a similar pattern to last week :)

Once again I showed this to the class to reinforce that the more effort you put in to your learning, the more you learn!  

Share - Reflect - Data Analysis

Is there any initial evidence to back up my idea that these SOLO-structured, literacy-focussed, culturally-located learning sequences support learning?

Well, when I created them - no. I went with my gut/teacher instinct and the readings/research I'd already completed, but I had to just make it and then see what happened. 

Let's have a look at how the learning went down with my Year 9 class - 9TGn. We began to learn about Ecosystems; in particular what an 'ecological niche' is.

First I introduced the topic and we watched the first 5 minutes of this video on stone-age farmers. Students were mostly engaged. Then they made a copy of the activities for Specific Learning Outcome 1. 

Over the course of the week students progressed at different speeds through the learning activities, with me able to float around and discuss the concept and try to motivate them onwards. Students asked for help at different places to one another.

The SOLO activities included students forming their own definition of what an ecological niche was my mixing and merging two online definitions. Then they moved on to complete a guided reading activity in pairs or small groups (which I have already blogged about here), a vocabulary activity that asked students to represent the vocabulary with an image AND in a sentence, and finally the last activity asked them to apply what they had learned about ecological niche's to their own lives (what is their own ecological niche?).

During the last 15 minutes on Friday we 'played' this 10-question Kahoot (which is actually a data-gathering tool for me). 

And LOOK at the glorious correlation between kahoot scores and the highest level of SOLO activity that was completed!!

Here is the raw data I used to calculate the averages, if anyone is interested: 

In summary the further that students progressed through the learning activities, the higher they scored (on average) on the 10-question kahoot at the end of the week's learning. One exception to this was a student who only completed the Multistructural activity but scored 90% on the kahoot to take the win - but the overall pattern was still visible.

I will repeat this data analysis next week with a new SLO about 'natural selection.'