Inspection
Evaluation/Assessment
Have your students presented you with enough information and artifacts that they have proven they are guilty of understanding?
Assessments:
This project was assessed in a variety of ways. These are included below:
- Journal Entries: Students kept a log of their discoveries, contributions, and challenges faced as they worked through the project. These were used as a “check-up” for daily progress as well as “hard evidence” if needed at the end of the project to justify final scoring (this didn’t end up being necessary)
- Teacher Observations: On a daily basis. Student work was monitored, time on task, cooperation, etc. This assessment was utilized more as an opportunity to intervene and guide students back on track rather than an opportunity to assign a grade.
- Self Evaluation: Students had an opportunity to assess themselves in this project. They assigned themselves a fraction of the group’s points, based upon what they felt their contribution was. They were also required to justify their assignment of points with their log (see above).
- Peer Evaluation: Students had an opportunity to assess their peers in this project. They assigned each team member a fraction of the group’s points, based upon what they felt their contribution was.
- Final Report: Each team submitted a written report with photos, diagrams, and explanations of all of the unique features of their cat. Interestingly, both groups took very different approaches to this project, but both met with success! The written report was graded as a team grade, and points were divided based upon the previously listed evaluations
The Boing Boing the Cat Design Log establishes for the students the scoring system that will be used for the project. A final presentation for a real audience, as we had with Dr. Hench, often proves to be an enormous motivator. In our case the importance of the audience yielded great effort and attention to detail, depth of analysis, and determination to complete a working prototype by the deadline established for the project from the beginning. To recreate such an authentic audience would be to establish validity for the project, and would enable another group of students to engage in this project at the same level and with the same realization of learning outcomes.
An audience could be provided for the students from the community. There are resources available in most communities to assist teachers in conducting a project such as the “Bionic Cat.” Some possibilities include calling the local chapter of the Engineering professional organization (such as The Ohio Society of Professional Engineers ) to make a “contact” with a professional who is interested in becoming involved in a project such as this. Additionally, many schools have opportunities to build community-based business partnerships. Some of these businesses may have engineers on staff who are interested in projects such as this. Perhaps a local robotics engineer or hobbyist could be invited to come to the presentations as a learned and honored guest.
