Intelligent marking

2019 January 14 Monday 22:08

"Get them to do the work", so said an experienced teacher to this novice on a training course. With this in mind, decided to adopt this strategy, under the guise of "formative feedback" and "specific topic revision" for those all-important gc(s)es due in the few months ahead:

• Photocopy original exam paper (someone is going to cheat!)
• Give copies to student
• Review common errors and make salient notes in preparation for discussion next lesson
• Discuss mark scheme during lesson
• Students give their provisional marks
• Review papers for ambitious(!) marks and complete data entry as usual

Why is chemistry difficult?

2019 January 19 Saturday 16:41

It is that time of the year to try and get year 11 students to be a bit more serious:

				Biology					Chemistry				Physics
				1st Qu.:23.00		1st Qu.: 6.00		1st Qu.:20.00
			

Recent test data (as above) confirms an anecdotal suspicion, that the majority of students hate chemistry. This data set extract (courtesy of R statistics software) shows the first quantile values of recent sciences test scores. In other words, the quantiles scores show that students achieve chemistry scores at least 25 % lower than the other natural sciences. Too abstract, unforgiving language (yes, sulphate is not the same as sulphite and thus spelling does matter), requires deep concentration (pun intended; quantitative chemistry is rarely enjoyed). These are the reasons that students have claimed against the subject. Let's not forget primary schools who seemingly prefer to teach biology (plants, animals) and physics (objects moving).

Is this replicated elsewhere? How to reverse, or is this observation a fact of life?