3/9-Elizabeth-Making Modeling More "Meaningful" to the Majority

In general, it was interesting to see an EOC and TCAP exam and the type of questions asked.  As a student from a private school, I never experienced these examinations so I knew little about them.  I saw many differences between the EOC exam and the TCAP but was depressed by both of them.  As we previously noted, many of the questions asked involve laboratory equipment (EOC exam).  There were several questions about which instrument was more useful in measuring out a certain amount of liquid or to find the density.  To me, while knowing what laboratory tools use should use for different circumstances, there are more important and pressing concepts.  In TCAP, there were more “thinking questions,” but the chemistry questions asked (only 8^th grade) were very random and broad.  When looking at the Tennessee Chemistry Blueprint, while they did include many important topics, they did not include kinetics, such as rate limiting step, activation energy, etc.  This may be because they are more critical thinking questions and not good multiple choice, learned in later grades…I don’t know.  Furthermore, I thought they could include more images/pictures, especially the EOC exam.  For instance, students may not know the names of the laboratory equipment and may benefit more from images, so they can refer back to their own experience in the lab and think about what they used.  While there are no Netlogo programs for laboratory equipment, I did find multiple questions on the EOC Chemistry Exam about the Ideal Gas Law.  While they mainly were plug-and-chug questions, the principles behind the Ideal Gas Law are critical for students to understand.  Furthermore, with this understanding, students can predict their outcome and know if they made a math mistake if something is not right/what they predicted.   The Netlogo model labeled Connected Chemistry 7 Ideal Gas Law would be perfect for this.  Within this model, students have the opportunity to manipulate variables such as the number of particles, volume, pressure, and temperature (variables of the gas law equation).  Through this, they can observe what happens when one variable is raised or lowered and the others are kept constant.  It would be important for students to write down their predictions first with an explanation, run the model, and note the outcome, supporting the conclusion with data.  The complexity of this model can be raised (if students are getting bored because they understand what is going on) by manipulating two variables and seeing how these in turn effect the gas law.  Is one variable more effective than another?  Finally, if students want to break down the number of variables used or you want to make this lesson a multi-day adventure, there are other models in the Connected Chemistry section of Netlogo that deal with two variables (i.e. pressure and number of particles) while keeping the rest constant. 

The only TCAP test that included chemistry within the science section was for the 8^th grade.  However, there were no adequate Netlogo programs that could be used to successfully model a direct concept involved on the TCAP.  The exam surprisingly had multiple questions involving the Law of Conservation of Mass.  One model, Chemical Equilibrium, could be used to show that the number of total particles stays the same (Conservation of Mass).  However, this model could not be used as extensively as the Ideal Gas Law model was used in the EOC exam.  I would interested to see if other modeling programs had better fitted models for this exam.

1.     What is the best way for students to engage in modeling?  Give them a detailed worksheet where they have to answer multiple questions or a more open-ended worksheet?  Small groups, individually, whole class?

2.     Should you include the EOC exam questions/TCAP questions with the unit, on worksheets, include them on your own tests, etc?