Week Three - Physics

I wanted to add some comments about what I am learning in Physics as well as Chemistry, because I feel that the learning really doesn't take place by itself.

This weeks' physics class was certainly fiery. We were asked to mark three pieces of students work, without any guidance. It really was a difficult task, because we didn't know anything about what was expected from the students by their teacher. It was also difficult because each of the experimental reports where on a different experiment. This meant that we couldn't even really have an accurate comparison, since the topic (and even year level of the students) was different!

I commented at the time that I couldn't mark these. I didn't feel it was fair to give marks to these students since their reports lack almost all the essential information I would expect from my students in a lab report. Yet as Raph commented it would be unfair to mark students down for something they were not asked to provide.

In the end I did mark the students down, because I took the task as if I was marking work I had set and been given. In reality this was not a fair way to mark it, but there was no fair way to mark it. We didn't know what the critera was, and could only guess at what they had been asked to do. We also had no idea at what level these students usually worked at. Was this work significantly better than their previous work, the same, or worse? All these factors I believe would be incorporated when marking work.

There were a few things about the work that I did feel strongly about, which is why I decided to give the pieces such low marks. The reports lack any significant sort of discussion about what had occured during the experiment or what they had learnt from it. I believe that both of these elements are critical to the experiment because it shows that the student has taken something out of the task.


Discussion about what occurred IS different from the method. In experiments we often do not follow the set method that we started with. There are many reasons for this (ie missing equipment/chemicals, something broke, something unexpected happened). I believe it is important for students to acknowledge what was different about their intended method and their actual method. Both as a way of showing me that they know why it occurred, and so I can see why their results may have varied.

The other important part missing from the reports was a conclusion that matched the aim. I believe that this is important because it shows me that the students understood what the purpose of the experiment was. Vague statements that just state that the did the experiment (ie In this lab I was able to work out Young's Modulus) does not say thing about the results of the experiment or what they actually achieved from the experiment. As Tony and Raph (maybe others) pointed out it is possible that your results do not match the aim. But in these cases students could still show that they understood the purpose, by stating what they should have found, why they didn't and what they found instead. Once again this shows me that they understood what the purpose of the experiment was, and what they have learnt.