This year, as has been the case other times, I won’t know exactly everything about how students are going to be assessed in one of my courses. There are multiple reasons for this:

(1) On the first day of class, students will help decide how their notebooks will be assessed based on on activity where we examine several scientists notebooks and try to reach some consensus about what the purpose of notebooks are and what should be included in one. From this, I will draft a rubric for which students will have to self-assess by pointing me to various points of their notebook that show evidence for standards and criteria that are set. While I have ideas that will contribute that will almost certainly make it the rubric, there are certain criteria that are bound to emerge to be particular to this class. Students will assess their notebooks three times during the semester. I’ll use these rubrics, in addition to examining their notebooks for completeness, in order to provide “grades” for this part of the course.

(2) Students are also accountable to the people and knowledge that is developed and made public within our class–including investigations carried out by other student research groups, various models of physical phenomena as they develop–including the ones that are proposed and later discarded, evidence we collect, arguments we construct, and foothold ideas we establish along the way. Of course, a lot of this will be very closely aligned with canonical scientific understandings; but they will also be embedded in our specific classroom discourse, the particular investigations we carryout, and the arguments we construct. I know that we will make contact with ideas such as “light travels in straight lines”, “light goes out in all directions”, and rules about how light interacts at various surfaces, but I’m not just assessing them on whether or not just “know” and “understand” these rules. I am assessing them on their ability to make claims, to explain and construct arguments, and to do so in ways that are accountable not only to this knowledge, but to the ways in which our class has come to know and understand them and to talk about them. While there are specific criteria explained to the students for what it means to be accountable to knowledge and the communities that generate them, the conceptual substance of the knowledge for which they will be held emerges within the curriculum rather being imposed at the start.

(3) Participation is a part of the grade for this course, but not in an attendance sort of way. They are assessed on their participation in the community–as a participant who contributes to the development of knowledge and the activities which serve to generate it. In the class, students work both as part of a “research group” and “writing group” to which they are accountable for making contributions both as developers and critics. Students also play a role in sharing work from their research groups to the whole class. As with the notebooks, students have to self-assess and submit to me evidence of their contributions to the knowledge community. Of course, students are not expected to participate the very same way. The self-assessment rubric allows students to participate differently, but it still must be significant and substantive. One of the biggest part of the self-assessment is them telling where they could improve their participation. Once again, there are specific criteria I share with students and ask them to provide evidence, but what exactly it looks like to be a contributing member within a community varies from person to person and from class to class, just as it does from community to community within science.

It sounds like there is a lot of ambiguity. I think there is and there isn’t. So I have decided this. The goal I have for myself, during and after this semester, is to work on better articulating each part of the course such that I might be able to create more specific learning standards. The nature of the course makes some of this difficult, but I think it will still worth it in the long run.

Andrew asks us sig-fig-haters, “How would you want students to report this measurement?”

” I measured the length and width of a sheet of printer paper in centimeters. I came up with l=27.95 cm and w=21.60 cm. Each of the measurements I believed to be within ±0.05 cm. If I want to find the area, what value should I report? l×w=603.72 cm2 without regard to the number of figures being reported.”

Ignoring units for a moment, I’d be happy with any of following, plus some more:

604 ± 2
603.7  ± 1.9
“A little more than 600 cm , give or take a few”
“Most likely somewhere in between 601 and 605.”

So, beyond all of that, to me, it’s important to distinguish among three different things:

(1) The habits of mind we are trying to cultivate (e.g., here a sensitivity toward describing measurement in terms of distribution in which the actual value is likely to reside, and an understanding of why we might care to do so)

(2) A particular strategy or set of strategies we want students to feel confident using when determining those distributions (e.g., crank three times, monte carlo, calculus methods, etc.)

(3) The particular standards or conventions for reporting measurment and uncertainty when publishing for an broader audience (e.g., error bars, sig figs, confidence intervals, etc).

My thinking: If you are conflating these three, you are going to run into trouble. Of course, I want students to learn #1. But I don’t think you can learn that in the abstract. So we’ll have to talk about #1 in relation to a variety of #2’s. But doing #2’s of course doesn’t imply that they are supporting #1. Students can learn to do carry out the procedures of #2 without any idea of #1.  #3 is where I think I should be really careful. Me personally, I’d hold off on demanding particular standards until students are publishing their work for an audience greater than the teacher. Different communities, even different journals, have different standards for reporting measurements and their uncertainty. Those conventions serve a purpose, but I want students to make contact with the necessity for convention when they are communicating their research to an audience (even if just peers in class), not just completing exercises for homework or on exams.

I’m working through more of the SGSI roadmap. Today, I built a pinhole theater using a cardboard box, some duct tape, a white piece of paper, and aluminum foil. The box is big enough to put your head in, the duct tape is to block out all the light at the corners and seams of the box, and the aluminum foil is covering a hole I cut out, which makes it easy to create the pin hole and then change the pinhole size or shape. Across from the pinhole is taped a white piece of paper. When I stick my head in, I just use a sweatshirt to block out the light around my neck, and look at the white paper.

To me, pinhole theatres are more engaging and interactive than pinhole cameras, because it’s like a movie.As you move, what’s showing on the screen changes.

Here are questions that I think can arise in building one and taking it outside:

• How does it work?
• Why is the image “inverted”?
• Why do we need a pinhole?
• Why does the picture get blurry with bigger holes? What makes things blurry in general?
• Why do other shapes (e.g., small triangle) work?

Other things can come up as well. For example, when shining light on the white paper in the theatre, you need a pinhole to show an “image” (technically not an image), BUT with a mirror, a mirror always shows an image without a pinhole. How is a mirror different from a white piece of paper? Doesn’t white reflect all light?

To make sense of these questions, new investigations arise. Including shining light through holes, down tubes, onto paper, shining multiple lights through holes, shining lights through multiple holes, eventually toward figuring out how light gets from sun to objects in the world, to the screen, to your eye, and what happens to the light at each stage.

So, we have mag-lites, then pin hole theatres driving our investigations, and then I think it’s onto eyes.

@ adchempages wrote to me on twitter that the life lessons he aims for students to learn are the following: Discipline, Punctuality, Politeness, Deadlines, Respect, and Accountability.  In this post, I elaborate on what those words mean to me.

Discipline: I interpret this as mostly involving self-discipline. To me, having discipline involves persistence with the work of moving toward one’s own goals, especially in face at adversity. It is not discipline to obey others or to fulfill the goals that others have for you.

Punctuality: I interpret this to mean to strive to act with conviction when needed, and to have one’s words be coherent as possible with one’s actions. It is not to be on time, but rather to be exact in one’s actions.

Politeness: I interpret politeness to be humble in the face of the unknown and unknowable. Politeness is the counterpart to punctuality.

Deadlines: I see this as the need to act in a timely way such that no one else is harmed by one’s inaction, especially those to which you hold community relation. The premise for this is that the choice not to act is an act.

Respect: To be receptive to possibility that you can learn from anyone and everyone and to act in ways to make learning interactions more probable and more fruitful.

Accountability: To be aware of one’s multiple and often conflicting responsibilities to self and others and to act in ways that are mindful of such conflicts. It is to treat community as part of self and self as part of community.