The Results of the Learning Progression Model in One Course

The end of the school year fast approaches. All of the final attempts have been scored. Aren’t you curious about the results?

Well, let’s go through them: lab, project, and test.

The last set of labs was great! Overall, students surpassed benchmarks (which were Proficient for all four standards). It will come as no surprise that the most difficult for them was Data Analysis.

The last project demonstrated clear mastery of the Engineering Design Process. I really enjoyed going through them. They met benchmarks for this; overall, I was very satisfied with their performance.

The unit 5 test was… horrific. Disappointing is simply too mild to describe the level of setback I saw across the board. Even my best students did poorly! Let me be specific. On the first question, they were being assessed on Creating Scientific Explanations. To earn Proficient, they must overtly state the physics concept they are using to answer the question. Over and over, I told students, “The first thing you should write is the big idea of the unit, in this case, The Law of Conservation of Energy: Total mechanical energy remains constant unless work is done. Then answer the question using that statement to help.” Not only did a majority of students NOT do this, some didn’t use anything from the unit at all, reverting back to Newton’s Second Law of Motion. It’s not that using F=ma is incorrect; on the contrary, it enriches the explanation. But our rubric requires the use of content from the current unit. Obviously (to me) if we are assessing the mastery of Energy concepts on the Energy Unit Test, students must use it… (Adding other previously-learned topics is actually an Expert level response, if combined with the current topic.)

A second area of ridiculously-poor performance was Graph Interpretation. All year students have learned that they must use feature(s) of the graph presented to answer the question. For some reason, most of them simply critiqued the graph or answered the question theoretically without citing any actual specific evidence such as coordinates, the slope of the line, or the area under the line. I was literally agape, reading response after response. These received “Not Enough Evidence”. The best responses that I got simply said the graph looks linear, with no hard proof… they got Beginning.

This drove the overall performance levels down significantly from the previous test.

Obviously, something was up. We’ve all given tests like this occasionally… and sometimes it’s hard to figure out why. Here are my questions:

• Are kids are burned out and stretched thin with culminating assignments and assessments like the AP exams?
• Is cheating rampant, and, if so, is this the result of following one or two of the leaders down a wrong path?
• Were they were distracted by preparations for the junior prom (which was 2 days later, then heading into a 5 day weekend where most of them were going to the beach)?
• Was the graph interpretation question poorly worded on my part?
• Could Saturn have been in the house of Aries, and this boded poorly for test-taking?

Whatever the reasons, I cannot let this stand. If it happened to just a few kids and ones I might expect, I would leave it be. But this happened to my best students as well as my worst.  I decided: a retest is in order. I needed to know if they actually know this or not. I sent out a survey, walking them through their scores and their current grade. Then I asked which questions they would want to redo, and had them complete an agreement. The agreement included attending a mandatory extra help session for each question they want to retake, and agreeing to come into school for the retake itself.

The following week, I held extra help sessions during class time. Those kids who didn’t choose to participate worked on their projects. I created yet another problem set, one per question type. I did a few in each class, and left them the remainder to practice with. I had near-perfect attendance for these sessions, with only one student not showing up (and therefore ineligible for the retake). The rest either came to their session or to another class’s session, which was fine with me. I also posted a recording of the class for them, but no answer key to the remaining practice. I just didn’t have the time or the energy.

I gave the retake on the “make up day”, when all classes were asynchronous (aka no classes), in two sittings: 9AM and 12PM. Those kids who communicated difficulty getting to school, I accommodated by allowing them to work remotely, but there was only a handful. Kids left as soon as they were done, only doing the questions they chose. The results were fantastic. Their responses overall were a million times better, with all but a few nailing the Proficient level on this attempt.

Here are the results of the course overall. One last graph, demonstrating the incremental growth over time on 10 distinct skills.

While I am so pleased with the overall results, I have to admit that I am absolutely and totally fried. The last few weeks have been uniformly stressful, with my entire body oozing cortisol on a more or less nonstop basis. I have done nothing but work. This has nothing to do with the Learning Progression Model, just with my own inability to find balance, make light of difficulties, and step away from imperfection. It also has a lot to do with the expectations of students and parents in our district… there are unrealistic expectations about student achievement (aka grades), and I don’t want to deal with the onslaught if kids don’t do well. Perhaps I will discuss grade translations in another post, but right now, I honestly don’t want to think about it.

So now I will go fall on the floor and rest. Just for a little bit. Soon enough, I’ll have to start preparing for next year. But not yet. Not quite yet.