* evil prosecutors and how students emulate them
* energy bar charts for different systems
* using annotated calculations to teach the paragraph response technique
* multiple ways of looking at collision/energy problems
* applying the paragraph response rubric
Go ahead - listen here. Let me know what questions you have, and what you'd like me to discuss in a future podcast.
greg
Good summary of the problem and the answer. I'll probably refer my students to this broadcast. You hit on something that has been bothering me, though: I agree with you that students answer more completely and show their knowledge better when they lay out the reasoning first and come up with the conclusion last, rather than becoming the "evil prosecutor," as you say. I have to ask, then: why aren't the questions themselves written that way on the Free Response? Does the College Board realize that students would score higher with a slight rewording of the question order?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I spoke online with one of the graders of this problem, and he said one of the biggest problems students faced on it was thinking that Part A necessarily had to do with Part B; that one of the most common wrong answers to Part B was along the lines of, "Because the period changed, so did the amplitude." My hypothesis: if Part A of this problem simply hadn't existed, students would've scored better on Part B. I'm curious if you have any general tips on when and in what contexts to expect different parts of problems to actually depend on each other, and in what contexts students can disregard all previous sections of the problem. Is there a pattern they should look for? Or should every Part be treated as its own problem until proven otherwise, a la innocent until proven guilty?