April+20,+2011

Reflection 8 – Wednesday April 20, 2011

Today was our first experience will having students’ complete experiments themselves. For the most part, this was a very good lesson. We were working with group one which had eight students. When we looked at a roster, we realized that one of the students was not placed in any group so we had her included in group one. This worked out very well because there was one group that was missing a member today so the student was just placed this group. The task for today was to have the students write up a procedure for their experiment and then complete the experiment. Since the last time we had saw them, we had gathered all of the supplies that they thought they would need as well and what we knew they needed because in some cases they were a little different. The students were very antsy and just wanted to get started on their experiment and not the procedure. After overcoming this obstacle, the students began their experiment. We had broken the groups up so that each of us could work with two specific groups and they would be our focus. This worked well for us because each of the groups need specific help and it was easier on ourselves to only focus on two experiments, their actually supplies, procedure, and results. During the experiments, some of the groups figured out their mistakes on their own while others need the extra help and some of the experiments did not even work like they were suppose to. This was helpful for us because when we first introduced the Scientific Method, we had told the students that experiments do not always work and that they may need to go back to a hypothesis before moving forward. The students did not believe that they could “fail” at an experiment and need to start it over so this emphasized out point and made the students realize that it was the truth. We had allotted two hours time to write up the procedure and complete the experiment and most of the groups were done within and hour and fifteen minutes. The extra time was helpful thought for the groups that did take longer. If we would have tried to complete the experiments in 45-60 minutes, we think we would have run into many different road blocks that would have frustrated not only us but also the students. The student seemed to enjoy do an experiment and we are looking forward to the next step of the process tomorrow.