Thursday, January 06, 2005

Extended Responses in My Class

Yesterday I began my experiment with having students write extended reponses in their blogs. Well, almost. The blogs don't come until Monday. In class yesterday I had my students score explanations from students of a problem we solved in class on Tuesday. Each explanation could given one of three scores: 3-excellent, 2-good, 1-fair, 0-poor. Each student was also required to provide a comment or two telling why they gave it that score. The plan is to use these comments today to build a rubric for a 3-excellent extended response and have students refer to this as they write future ones.

Today I will assign the problem and have the students solve it in class. Monday they will enter their solutions into their blogs. Here is the problem:

Mark’s heart beats 16 times in 15 seconds. At that rate, how many times will it beat in one minute? Be sure to include the appropriate unit.

The standard is select appropriate units for measuring derived measurements. For example, MPH and RPM.

As with any experiment, several questions have surfaced. How will I grade these? If students use symbols, tables, diagrams, or certain mathematical notation that can't be found on the keyboard, how do I get that into the blog? We'll get to those on Monday.

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