ImagineIT Update #1
I am slowly working towards getting all my perseverance ducks in order, so to speak. Friday, February 12th, I had another focus group with my students, this time to come up with a rubric for perseverance. This seemed like an impossible task: How do you measure something inherently immeasurable? But after we talked for a bit, we came up with four general tactics that students do when they persevere on a math problem:
I've attached the rough draft of each rubric with an explanation for each section.
- Annotate (which includes underlining important facts, writing relevant equations, drawing diagrams and listing the unknowns which one is trying to find)
- Showing work
- Using different methods to try and solve the problem
- Redoing incorrect work
I've attached the rough draft of each rubric with an explanation for each section.
AnnotatingAnnotating is the one area where we didn't think it was necessary to have the correct answer. We also debated whether it was okay to not annotate, but to still show perseverance, and we decided that anyone who is good at persevering does a lot of annotating.
We also decided that since there are 4 aspects of annotating, each one that the student includes was worth a point on the scale. |
Using Different MethodsUsing different methods includes getting the question correct. We decided this because it didn't seem to make sense to try a different method without it getting you closer to the answer.
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My next steps will be to give students a problem and this rubric and see how they do using the rubric, sort of a baseline. Following that, we will start to work on pairing up and having one student select a strategy, and the other not interfere with that strategy, unless the first student decides to. This would allow the students work on following through, (possibly) realizing that their initial idea is wrong, and that they might have to change their track.
ImagineIT Update #2
I don't have much to update on this yet. School has become very busy, but this coming week, I am planning on giving my calculus students a word problem and measuring them on the perseverance rubric, just to get a baseline value. I then plan on measuring their scores, aggregating them and seeing what type of result I get. Eventually, I would like to give them a second question, measure their results and compare to the first results.