Section+B

=My knowledge and skills in planning, assessing and reporting have had a positive impact on students’ learning. =

In analysing various sets of results from HSC to School Certificate and UNSW [|Science Competition] results I have come to understand that if I want my students to develop certain skills, I must embed them in the planning of the program I am to teach. I have adopted a method that I call “[|Backward Planning]”. I have encouraged my faculty to look at planning this way and have developed a document which looks at the [|Essential Skills] that are fundamental to the successful study of Biology and others have done the same for Chemistry and Physics. The aim here is to review our teaching/learning to reflect the skills and processes in which we expect our students to be competent and confident. This review is essential as we modify and refine our program of study.

I am also looking at assessment tasks as formative, rather than summative tasks. I shall illustrate this through a progression of research and report based assessment tasks.

[|R&R Biotechnology] Task Year 10 2007
This is a fairly traditional research and report task. At the time, I felt that many research and report tasks were essentially ‘cut and paste’, so we changed the emphasis allowing the students to take in a page of hand written notes on the topics that we had set. Because their notes were limited in space, they had to be able to summarise and then expand on their notes to answer specific content based questions. We found that students would often just copy the notes they had made, not necessarily addressing the question at hand. We did feel, however, that they had used this research to cover some of the content thus making this task a formative experience.

[|PFA Task] Year 10 2011
At the time that this task was carried out I was supervising a practicum student. We discussed the fact that he had never had to make an assessment task, other than a content test, so it was decided that he would plan a task using the outcomes of the course that the students were studying, but make the assessment based on some appropriate [|PFA's] from the NSW syllabus. The idea of learning through assessment not only gives students a structured way to develop skills but it provides them with timely feedback. In this case, even though it was felt that the students would not be able to just ‘cut and paste’, this is exactly what was done by many students. They also tended to include information because they could find it, rather than because it was relevant to the question.

===Year 9 Earth & Environment Studies 2012 [|(presented on iSchool] ===

This year I am teaching year 9 E & E, spanning Ecology and Tectonics. I presented this course on iSchool [the school Moodle site]. My focus skills have been in finding and evaluating information using a number of different sources. To that end I planned a number of tasks that would help my students develop these skills. The [|end of topic task] asked students to pick a National Park anywhere is the world. They had to choose one ecological feature and one geological feature and justify why this park should be protected. Within the task I provided a scaffold which would help students find information, summarise it and reference it. This summarised information then needed to be included in a brochure aimed at the lay public. In order to prepare students for this task they undertook a number of activities:-


 * An ecological study of the Hattah-Kulkyne National Park ~ group work [see iSchool above].
 * A piece of [|persuasive writing] about National Parks.
 * A Google Earth tour in "[|Tectonic Activity]".

Each of these activities provided the students with the skills and information to carry out the final task.

In this way they were exposed to the type of activity required, guided through that activity and provided with feedback in preparation for their final task.

I report back to the student via written feedback and to the parent through written reports and/or parent/teacher interview on the progress of their child. I often scan students’ work so that when I speak to parents I am able to show examples of what I expect their daughters’ to do, where they excel and where they need further help.

At the end of each topic session I [|Survey] the students for feedback so that I am able to modify the tasks and learning experiences that I provide in the next session.