CAT 1 Directed Paraphrasing Activity

Teacher:

Cheryl Hudson

Context:

The class chosen for the CAT 1 exercise is a 10th grade biology class that has been working on osmosis.

Background:

The students had spent one week conducting an osmosis lab where they soaked an egg in different solutions each day in order to observe the direction of diffusion of water through a cell membrane. At the end of the lab, students answered analysis questions that facilitated their ability to classify each solution as hypertonic, hypotonic, or isotonic based upon the data.

Task:

The following Directed Paraphrasing Activity was conducted immediately prior to a unit test on cellular transport to determine if students could connect learning from a four-day osmosis lab to a realistic scenario they might face:

You overhear some middle school aged athletes talking about hydrating before exercise.  One athlete tells another, “You should drink two gallons of water before the game so you don’t become dehydrated”. How would you explain the problem with this advice to the young athletes?

Write your response to the athletes using at least four sentences.

Results:

1

confused

2

minimal

3

adequate

4

excellent

19 students

2 students

3 students

1 student

Closing the Loop:

When the papers were returned to the students and the purpose of the classroom assessment was again related, the students were able to recognize the connection of the lab concepts and the situation of drinking too much water. Most students agreed that the biology curriculum would be more meaningful when presented with applications.

Reflection:

I probably did not emphasize clearly that the students should specifically connect what they learned in the osmosis lab to the issue of drinking too much water at the time of the Directed Paraphrasing task. If I only change one practice this semester, it will be to incorporate this type of classroom assessment for learning to help scaffold the ability of most of my students to apply lab concepts to different situations for every lab.  In addition, students will transcribe each application question and their answer in their science journal.

Source:

“This assessment was created based on guidelines from the following book: Doran, R., Chan, F. & Tami, P.  (2002). Science Educator’s Guide to Laboratory Assessment. Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association.

Acknowledgement:  The author completed this assessment while a student at Montana State University