Prior knowledge video |
Transcript |
Researcher's commentary |
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My topic is chemical reactions.
I don't really know much about chemical reactions but when you put two things together it makes something different, and that's practically all I know.
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Like many other students in this project, this girl is using 1st person narrative rather than 3rd person. This is unusual though as this girl is the only 2011 participant to have also also participated in the 2010 Storyboard trial.
I've also copied and pasted her slide headings as follows:
- What is a chemical reaction?
- Why do we do chemical reations?
- How did we find about chemical reactions?
- An example of a chemical reaction
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Completed explanatory animation |
Transcript |
Researcher's commentary |
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Atoms are the building blocks of matter.
A molecule is a group of atoms.
Atoms are sometimes named after the first letter:
They are sometimes based on the first two letters.
Sometimes the letters have nothing to do with the element.
Au for Gold.
Ag for Silver.
A number following the element refers to the quantity of those atoms.
The number comes after the element.
For example, H2O means two hydrogens and one Oxygen, H2O4S means two hydrogens, four oxygens and one sulphur
The order in which the elements are written usually follows the rule developed by Edwin Hill in 1900. According to this rule, when you have Carbon it goes first, Hydrogen is second and the rest are in alphabetical order.
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This was one of the longest animations because there were two examples for each point. The other factor which added to the length was the slow and measured speed of delivery for her voice-over script.
It was interesting to me that the decision to use the names (words) and letter abbreviations for the elements rather than represent them graphically made the task much more manageable. Labelling and naming is one of the easiest modes of representation.
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Final director's commentary |
Transcript |
Researcher's commentary |
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I changed from topic from “Chemical reactions” to “Chemical bonds” to “Molecular naming conventions.”
I liked how it went and how I made the letters light up when they were mentioned.
Brendan helped me with the animation and I like how he did some of the picturing.
So if you need to ever to learn about naming conventions just go to my animation.
Edwin Hill helped me get this animation correct and helped me get the actual information in order.
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This is the only director's commentary where I changed the video. In this case it was to speed up one passage as we didn't need as much time at this point. A precedent for doing this was set last year with the 2010 trial. This is documented in section 7.4.5 Director's commentary guidelines on the Data analysis page.
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Initial conceptual consolidation rubric |
Final conceptual consolidation rubric |
Researcher's commentary |
| Uses correct terminology |
With assistance |
Simplified terminology |
Some correct terminology |
Actual terminology |
Identifies relevant variables |
Not apparent |
With assistance |
Basic understanding |
Deep understanding |
| Identifies relationships between variables |
Not apparent |
With assistance |
Basic understanding |
Deep understanding |
| Self assessment. Does the student think that they understand their topic? |
No |
Not really |
Basic understanding |
Yes |
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| Uses correct terminology |
With assistance |
Simplified terminology |
Some correct terminology |
Actual terminology |
Identifies relevant variables |
Not apparent |
With assistance |
Basic understanding |
Deep understanding |
| Identifies relationships between variables |
Not apparent |
With assistance |
Basic understanding |
Deep understanding |
| Self assessment scale (1-10). Does the student think that they understand their topic? |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
7.5 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
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The 7.5 score for self assessment is what she said so I simply amended the rubric to accommodate a decimal.
This is one case where I to mark a student higher than their own self assessment. This may be because she remembers how difficult chemistry can be and how much of the initial research was too difficult. I am disregarding that and assessing her on the topic which she settled on.
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A single animation covering "Chemical reactions" would always have been too big but we didn't realise this at the start of the project. The change to "Chemical bonds" was also too big as there are several sub-categories such as covalent, ionic etc. There were also times when we thought we could come up with a novel way to represent bonds when we first encountered Lewis-style dot diagrams and her data collection page shows other attempts to show valency such as the jigsaw pieces idea. This student was very patient and willing to change as we also experimented with other analogies such as currency in an attempt to show that positive amounts are combined much like coins.
Ultimately, a topic change was in order and since finding Hill's rule we were confident that the topic would be covered adequately. In her own words: "So if you need to ever to learn about naming conventions just go to my animation."