NY Regents Archives - Page 3 of 5

10 Quick Tips for Higher Regents Physics Exam Scores #physicsed

Posted on June 13, 2011 by admin — 8 Comments ↓

Although by no means an exhaustive list, these 10 quick tips may help you secure that extra point or two on your upcoming Regents Physics exam.

Mass and inertia are the same thing.
To find the resultant, line your vectors up tip-to-tail, and draw a line from the starting point of the first vector to the ending point of the last vector.
Any object moving in a circular path is accelerating toward the center of the circle.
Acceleration of an object is equal to the net force on the object divided by the object’s mass.
The normal force always points at an angle of 90° from the surface.
Opposite charges and magnetic poles attract, likes repel.
Gravitational forces and electrostatic forces both follow an inverse square law relationship, where the strength of the force is related to one divided by the square of the distance between the charges/masses.
The force of gravity on an object, commonly referred to as weight, is equal to mg, where g is the gravitational field strength (also referred to as the acceleration due to gravity).
The mass-energy equivalence can be calculated using E=mc^2. If a mass is given in universal mass units, however, you can do a straight unit conversion using 1u = 931 MeV.
Protons and neutrons fall into the category of baryons, which are hadrons. Smaller particles, such as electrons, fall into the category of leptons. Mesons are rare, weird particles you probably haven’t heard of.

Most importantly, use your reference table. When in doubt, write down the information you’re asked to find, what you’re given, and use your reference table to help you narrow down what you should be doing. In the free response part of the test, make sure to show your work in detail with a formula, substitution with units, and an answer with units.

Find these and many more tips for success at APlusPhysics.com.

Streamline SBG Feedback with Gravic Remark OMR #sbar #edtech #physicsed

Posted on June 10, 2011 by admin — 2 Comments ↓

I’m going to try out Skills Based Grading (SBG) next year in my Regents Physics courses. I’ve talked to lots of teachers using it, read Marzano’s “Formative Assessment and Standards-Based Grading: Classroom Strategies That Work,” many terrific blogs, tweets, etc., and I’m convinced that providing students quick and detailed feedback on exactly how they’re doing with respect to course standards will benefit us all.

But I’m also worried. Worried about the hiccups, the unknowns, the corners I may drive myself into. Worried about tracking, about keeping up, about consistency. And I’m worried about my ability to provide and record all the detailed feedback necessary.

Without a doubt I’ve been one of the hardest-working teachers in the building… I’m usually in my room by 6:30 a.m., most afternoons I don’t leave until 4:30 or 5 p.m., one night a week I often spend working until 8 to 10 p.m., and I come in for half a day or so on weekends fairly regularly.

I enjoy what I do, and I don’t mind the time commitment. But I don’t want it to increase, especially with a family at home that I adore (and my daughter now believes watching baseball with Daddy is more fun than Mickey Mouse Clubhouse!!!). So I can’t allow SBG to take any more time from me during the school year. But how do I provide 100+ students with detailed, by-skill feedback on the larger standardized-type assessments, with multiple reassessment opportunities? (Yes, I know about the standardized assessments, but here in NY emphasis is being heightened on standardized testing, including up to 40% of a teacher’s performance evaluation).

I spent several months researching this problem, with potential solutions ranging from a multitude of “punch-out”-type answer keys for individual assessments, all the way to having students do multiple self-assessments and exam breakdowns. Of course, the personalized assessments that pervade the SBG mentality still apply, but for larger standardized assessments, including mid-terms and end-of-year practice exams and final exams, spending day after day grading the same exam across multiple skills just doesn’t make sense.

Finally, with the help of some terrific support folks at Gravic, I decided to try out Gravic Remark OMR. Remark OMR is a software package that allows you to scan multiple choice bubble sheets in a standard sheet-fed scanner, and evaluate them against an answer key which can break down questions into individual skill scores. Further, with multiple exams and versions of exams, you can bar code the exam answer sheets against the answer key to help prevent mis-scoring.

The software package comes with a built-in analysis package which makes breaking down scores by class, individual skills, demographics, or any other student input quick and easy.

Setup of answer keys is fairly straightforward — you can make your answer keys in Word or any PDF creation system, and print them out on a standard copier.

The downside – Remark OMR is expensive. A single-use installation license runs $995, and support is free for only 30 days. Getting up and running with the software takes a little bit of tinkering, but within a few days you can be creating exams, scoring keys, and grading 50+ MC question sets across 100 students in 10-15 minutes.

I wouldn’t recommend it for all courses, but in a course where standardized testing is emphasized, and you want to provide many students detailed score breakdowns on a repeated basis across many multi-skill assessments, Remark OMR has terrific potential. I used it as part of our Regents Exam review process this year… we gave the students old Regents Exams, and scored them using Remark OMR, providing each student detailed feedback on areas of strength and weakness. Then, students developed an individualized action plan to work on their greatest opportunities of improvement independently using each other, review books, course notes, and the APlusPhysics physics tutorials before sitting down for a reassessment.

This process was repeated several times, and student feedback has been tremendous – they love how their review work is tied directly to their performance, they appreciate being able to track their improvement as we get ready for their culminating exam, and they particularly love the immediate feedback facilitated by the quick scanning and scoring process.

Course Review Strategy Revisited #physicsed

Posted on May 10, 2011 by admin — 3 Comments ↓

Following several discussions with a number of science teachers, we’ve decided on a review strategy to prepare students for our cumulative standardized final exam in NY Regents Physics.

To begin the review sequence, students will be given standardized exam question printouts from previous years and will cut out the individual questions. Questions will be sorted into the main course topics and pasted on a blank sheet to create a worksheet consisting of single topics of questions from multiple years’ exams.

Each day, we’ll being the class with a 10-minute review video covering one of the key topics of the course. These have been created previously as part of the Physics In Action podcast, so this is very easy to implement.

Students will then be given a previous year’s Regents Exam, and asked to complete the first half of the exam. This will be repeated the following day, with students completing the second half of the exam.

On the third day, the exams will be graded and reviewed as a class. Students will then break down their scores to provide a separate score for each key unit from the exam using a diagnostic guide provided by the teacher.

Corrective actions must then be taken by the student based on their score in each topic. For scores above 85% in any topic, no corrective actions are required. For scores above 75%, three of the four corrective actions must be taken (student’s choice). For scores below 75%, all four corrective actions must be taken.

The corrective actions for each unit are comprised of

Determine correct answers to the problems you missed, showing all work including your initial formula, substitution with units, and answer with units.
Read
1. Textbook chapters covering unit in question OR
2. Regents Physics Essentials Review Book chapter covering unit in question.
View topic tutorial and associated pages on APlusPhysics.com. Take interactive quiz at end of section until you score 85% or higher.
Complete practice worksheet on topic and check answers.

This sequence will be completed three times over three weeks leading up to a final in-class exam, followed by the formal state standardized exam. Students who have completed their practice exam and corrections for the week may be released from class early, while those who need more practice will benefit from more class time as well as a lower student-to-teacher ratio as the week progresses.

Of course, the monotony of review will be broken up by occasional activities and supplemental lessons such as the always-popular time dilation discussion, reading of “Icarus at the Edge of Time” by Brian Greene, and other end-of-year activities.

Course Review Time – What Works Best? #physicsed

Posted on May 3, 2011 by admin — No Comments ↓

It’s closing in on that time… the dreaded end-of-the-year, when we finish our standard curriculum and begin to intermix “additional topics” of student interest in with review for our standardized final exam. But how do you keep 25 to 30 students productively across various topics based on individual needs at varying levels of aptitude?

I’ve tried a number of techniques… we cut questions out of old standardized exams and paste them onto unit-specific pages, using these unit-specific pages for practice. The students not only review the key topics, but also see the range of questions asked in previous years before diving into problem practice.

I’ve given previous exams, with students working through them at their own pace, scoring their exams, then working with me to jointly develop and execute an individualized action plan to attack their areas for improvement before repeating the process.

I’ve incorporated clicker question reviews. I’ve had students develop their own questions. We’ve jumped headfirst into hands-on lab exercises requiring knowledge of several “units” tied in together, and we’ve worked through projects to examine applications of physics in the real world. Each week students perform a different online assignment on one of our key topics, coupled with video podcast reviews of 10-15 minutes in length, in a flipped classroom approach.

With all these methods, implemented in a variety of configurations, I still haven’t found a review method I’m thrilled with. Nor even satisfied with. Without fail, the students who least need the review get the most out of the time, and the students who are in dire need of review find ways to avoid strong engagement.

One proposal for this year is to have all students take a practice exam, which is graded with separate scores for each key topic (in the vein of SBG). Students in need of extra help in any unit are assigned chapters to read along with a problem set from either the APlusPhysics review book or a stand-alone question set. Students most in need of review are assigned the most work, and students with the least need of review can finish up their work assignments more quickly, leaving the instructor more time with the struggling students. Each week students engage in another practice exam, again working to build familiarity with the questions, with classes interspersed between online question reviews, practice exams, and instructor-led topical review discussions and guided practice.

I don’t expect to find a magic bullet that addresses all situations, and talking to other teachers I find this to be a very common issue as well. I’d love to hear what you’ve tried – what’s worked, what hasn’t, and open this question up to the experience of others!