This week wrapped up trimester 2. Staff and students alike are very ready for spring break.

Physics

We stuck with our usual structure of using half the final exam period for a lab practical and half the period for an individual written final. One of the interesting things is that while students have been struggling to collect high-quality data during labs, most groups had pretty accurate results on the lab portion of the final. I think a lot of students have been struggling to connect different representations in general, including how their lab data connects to the concepts and mathematical models we are using. If students see the labs as disconnected, why should they invest the effort to get good quality data? I think that’s become self-reinforcing because when few groups have good quality data, it is harder to see the connection between the labs and the models we are developing. The new trimester will be a good time to interrupt this cycle. I think we will try collecting data as a class for a lab so that I can model things like graphing as I go and re-doing data points that don’t match the apparent pattern. On the final, I think grades provided an extrinsic motivation for high-quality data. I don’t want to default to making data quality a part of a students’ grade in my current grading system, but I could provide other extrinsic motivation like stickers for being below a given percent difference from the accepted value.

AP Physics 1

Students took a practice AP exam for their final. I’m really pleased by how well students scored, especially I gave students the full multiple choice even though there are some topics we haven’t covered yet. On the free response, I noticed some students struggled with parsing what the question was actually asking for, which is not unusual. Especially once we wrap up content and focus on review, I think I need to make sure we spend time on reading strategies for making sense of AP problems.