Post date: Oct 21, 2015 6:34:53 AM
I had the opportunity in my placement school to post a questionnaire to a tutor group of twenty-four Y7s before the October half term. Here is a short summary of their responses. This is far from solid educational research, but got the students engaged and was really interesting (and fun) for me reading the responses.
I am really interested in how students interest relates to their perceived ability at science and vice versa. I asked this question cold: there was no activity or warm up (although most had a science lesson that day and many had had tests during that week, which may have swayed things).
Overall there seems to be a positive correlation to between enjoyment and performance. Obviously it's hard to distinguish any correlation: there's a certain amount of chicken/egg and I believe as teachers it's important that we are able to support both ends.
Again this would be a great thing to pitch to students in other years, especially where they take a more objective view of their performance (lots of test, predicted grades, etc).
There are no great surprises here - it also seems that girls in Y7 enjoy practicals just as much as boys.
Writing and tests came up top of worst things Y7 have met so far. There were also a few worries about safety with bunsen burners!
There was almost 100% positive response to this question. Interesting ideas like life skill popped up frequently and there was the general feeling that learning about science was important. My favourite responses were "(learning about science is important) as you tell your family and friends what you've learnt" and also "No, I don't want to be a scientist because it's stressful."
It would be great to redo this question to later years (or even Y7s at the end of the year) and get their take on it.
Here the idea was to test some science misconceptions. The question about where plants get their food was open and the seasons was a multiple choice question.
This question was open and more students than I expected got this correct. This has not been taught yet at secondary school, but is nominally taught in Y6. It's unclear whether the students getting it wrong weren't taught this (either at all or deeply enough) or had forgotten.
Why do we have winter?
I don't think the reason behind the seasons has been formally taught yet, which is reflected by students responses (the correct answer was the earth's tilt).
I think it's really interesting and powerful that we're able to predict which misconceptions will top the bill (I guessed the earth-sun distance would top the bill) and this must surely reflect a common reasoning and experience which matches students' experiences so far.
I created the word clouds using Wordle.