Wednesday, January 10, 2001

Minutes of meeting re: Assessment of Lincoln 4^th grade activity

Present: Marlynne, Dave Haas, Janet Kim, Tom Moher

1. Talked about results from the Snookerpuss project

Contrary to our original assumption, the students had not been introduced to the ideas of interpolation and extrapolation before the intervention.

Students were formally taught these concepts some time after the intervention and made frequent references back to our lesson.

Marlynne comments on the lesson:

· The students stayed engaged

· The explanation of extrapolation/interpolation was good.

· The students grasped the concept of best-fit-line quickly.

· The students seemed to see the connection between the data table, and the graph.

· Originally it seemed like the lesson was trying to teach a great deal of material, but we made it work.

· The emphasis in the lesson on systematic ways of doing things is very beneficial for the students, and something that is often not explicitly taught in school.

· The class would benefit from graphing on a poster, so they have something they can take away from the lesson. (instead of the overhead)

· Letting the students make mistakes on the graph might have confused students that were paying attention.

2. Janet and Dave will write qualitative descriptions of the post-test results to augment the quantitative results that will be added to this website.