Physics: Whiteboarding

Students whiteboarded their answers to Friday’s questions. There were a few questions where students had some good discussion and connected some questions back to the lab where they’d mapped electric potential. I still need to work on getting students to talk to each other more than they talk to me.

Chemistry: Percent Yield

Students worked on some problems calculating percent yield. While they can do the calculations pretty easily, the concept seems pretty abstract to them. I need to find a good lab to make percent yield more concrete.

Physics: Electric Potential vs. Gravitational Potential

Students worked on a worksheet from the Modeling Instruction curriculum that draws analogies between gravitational potential and electric potential. Several students commented that relating electric potential to something more tangible helped them make sense of what we’ve been doing. I also had a very good conversation with a student about how last trimester, she really liked how connected the mechanics topics were, but doesn’t have the same sense with electricity. This confirms that I need to keep working on my storyline for this trimester, but it was great to hear some of the metacognition the student was doing and I consider it a sign of a good class climate that a student was willing to have that conversation.

Chemistry: More Whiteboarding

Students used whiteboards to work through another stoichiometry problem. A lot of students left with much more confidence than they’d started the day with.

Physics: Electric Potential Difference

In the past, I’ve motivated the need for electric potential difference in addition to electric potential purely through analogies to gravitational potential energy. Today, I tried an extension of the Modeling Instruction lab to map electric potential. I had students measure the voltage along a line in their tray of water with the multimeter’s ground attached to the negative lead of the power supply, then repeat with the ground attached to the power supply’s positive lead and the ground held somewhere in the middle. In the discussion, students agreed that the change in voltage is more meaningful than the specific value.

Chemistry: Whiteboarding Problems

Students struggled with the stoich problems I left them yesterday, so we took some time to go through the first part of one. I tried to be very explicit and specific in bringing up previous labs or activities that used each skill, and that seemed to help students make connections. Students then continued the problem in small groups working on whiteboards. I need to do more whiteboarding problems in this class; the whiteboards really helped students function as a cohesive group, which is really not surprising.