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| Reflection | ||||||
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Comments from Claudine Vacirca and Robert Link:
We saw a need for students to experience the power and usefulness of using mathematics to help solve problems in the world around them. We wanted the problem to be one that would grab their curiosity and easily fit into the earth science and math curricula. We also wanted them to have content knowledge in both areas, and be able to use that knowledge in the investigation of new ideas and the extension of those ideas. What the students lacked were the developing strategies to attack this problem. This we felt we needed to model for them, particularly in the symposium.
The last component was the monitoring of the project. Ongoing self-assessment both by the students and teachers accomplished this. The symposium was created as a way to make sure all participants in this project had another chance to see first hand strategies being used to help problem solving.
The decision to have the students write a report was to reinforce the idea that they could make logical connections in written form as well as orally. It gave students a chance to reflect on all aspects of the project and to help them become risk takers.
We learned that there are problems using dates and times in different spreadsheet programs with some work we were able to overcome these problems. We also learned that we needed to model the techniques of making connections by using multivariable models. For example, using overheads to show how overlapping graphs for different latitudes emphasized a common point of intersection. But what significance did that point have? Was this symmetry to be used to make predictions? We found that our group symposium gave us the opportunity to lead our students through the thought process needed to answer these and many other questions. The role of the teacher was to coach the student, and make the abstract concrete.
Students would have a high learning curve for instructional technology if they had no background in spreadsheets. For this reason, this activity was a continuation of a series of spreadsheet explorations. In preparation for this project, the students began with a simple set of measured data resulting in a linear graph. They measured the foot size and height of 20 different people. In the second activity, they developed a more complex spreadsheet using weather data from hurricane advisories they got off the Internet. This made the students familiar with time and the spreadsheet. This project incorporated the skills learned from the previous lesson and added some new ones, such as the trend line and correlation coefficient. The project also introduced to the students the idea of writing a report based on real-world data. This report was graded using a similar rubric.
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