First day of project

I got started on my TIP after a few modifications and a week of disruptive national Parliamentary elections. I gave my students in AP Chemistry and AP Physics each one (9-10 points) free-response question and a round of online collaboration work followed by a round of offline individual work for the same question.

The purpose of my TIP is to see the effect of offline versus online collaboration on student performance for AP science free-response questions. I am conducting individual testing after each round of collaboration to see if there is a residual effect on student performance after collaboration.



The design now consists of a 25-minute round of collaboration between 2-5 students followed by a 25-minute round of individual work. Students fill out individual surveys on their perception of their mastery of the topic being tested before each round and at the end. The former data collections will give me an objective, quantitative measure of group and individual student performance, while the latter data collection will give me a subjective, quantitative measure of student performance.

For these rounds, my AP Chemistry students used all the available time but my AP Physics B students finished early (18 minutes used for collaboration and 10 minutes used for individual work).

Trial run

I started my TIP research project data collection yesterday (AP Chemistry) and today (AP Physics) by getting my students collaborating online on one or two free response questions. However, a number of problems came to light and so I took these days as a trial run.

Here are the problems and my proposed modifications:

1. Short periods for group collaboration and individual testing on the same day --> Shorten the group and individual times from 30 min. to 25 min.
2. Google Docs lacks the ability to draw --> Direct students to Paint in Windows
   
3. Google Docs lacks the ability to cut and paste images --> Direct students FastStone Capture for screen capture.
4. Windows Calculator lacks important mathematical functions --> Direct students to
   
5. Surveys of student mastery lack needed information to help with record-keeping --> Add fields for date, name, topic of free response questions, and number of survey (i.e. first, second, third).
6. I need to reserve computer labs far in advance of research --> Reserve now.
   

Additional notes:

• I need to control the question length for each cycle of collaboration and testing. I will control the College Board point values to a reasonable number for each cycle. In other words, the students should have approximately equal number of points possible on any given set of questions given to them in an individual cycle. The numbers of questions might very but the number of points possible should remain constant, as possible.