Did all the students meet the learning objectives?

All of the students met the learning objectives.

For inquiry epistemic practice: Explain how you elicited student responses to promote thinking
and develop understandings of how to collect, analyze, and interpret scientific data.
Students were asked facilitative questions throughout the lesson to focus their understanding. The
questions included references to other classes, such as Algebra and Biology. Students were asked to
describe the shapes of their graphs and asked to relate tem to data that theyve seen before (population
growth curves etc.)
For argumentation epistemic practice: Explain how you elicited student responses to promote
thinking and support their ability to use evidence-based arguments to construct and defend an
explanation of a scientific phenomenon.
The evidence produced was related to the big questions regarding dating of fossils based on C14
analysis.
For negotiation of expository (science) text epistemic practice: Explain how you engaged
students in promoting their ability to comprehend and synthesize information across multiple
sources or texts.
This was a Canned Demonstration so that negotiating expository text was not part of the lesson.
For modeling epistemic practice: Explain how you engaged students in developing a
scientific/mathematical model for a complex situation.
Students were introduced to a model where too many people crowded into a small space creates an
unstable environment. And an analogy between spontaneous alpha decay and being evicted from a
crowded house party was made.
What in-the-moment pedagogical changes did you have to make in order to facilitate student
learning (i.e. social/cultural/language changes, epistemic practice changes, curricular changes,
individual student, small group, or whole class changes)?
Nonethis time.
Which students struggled and what caused the struggle (factual/misconception; conceptual
difficulty; procedural difficulty; metacognitive challenge; experiential [difficulty using students
own ideas about science concepts])?
Some students (including the GATE student struggled with producing a graph from collected data. They
had to be coached on dependent and independent variables. A group of students constructed the graph
backward (switching dependent and independent), but were still able to make calculations from the graph.

What changes will you make to your practices to better support student learning of the central
focus?
The changes that Id make would be to modify this activity into a true Inquiry and require students to
create their own testable hypothesis. This would tie their understanding more closely to the collected
evidence, and rather than trying to guess how the creators of the worksheet wanted data interpreted, they
would have addressed the Big Question using their own evidence.
Explain how feedback provided to the three students addresses their individual strengths and
needs relative to the standards/objectives measured.
The feedback accessed their understanding of algebraic concepts and tapped into their prior knowledge.
With the guidance, they were able answer the questions of how to construct and interpret their graphs
themselves rather than relying on the teacher to provide the information.

How will you support students to apply the feedback to guide improvement, either within the
learning segment or at a later time?
Student feedback given as part of the +/- communication at the end of the class will be analyzed and
used to determine which teaching practices engaged the students and which detracted from learning.
Based on your translation analysis of student learning presented in this section, describe next
steps for instruction
For the whole class:
The class requires better classroom disciplinary management to make it a safe, comfortable environment
for all students.
For the group of students your target student in situated:
The target student needs to be relocated into a group where his leadership qualities can be developed
and hes not so tempted to distract himself and those around him. While this is a homogenous group of
friends, the mix is toxic got their learning environment.
For the target student
The target student needs to be relocated into a group where his leadership qualities can be developed
and hes not so tempted to distract himself and those around him. He also needs to be challenged with
more advanced concepts for deeper learning with differentiated instruction.
Explain how these next steps follow from your analysis of student learning. Support your
explanation with principles from research/theory.
According to Good and Marshal (1984) students perform better academically when in heterogeneous
groups rather than homogeneous groups. While students should continue to work in small groups to need
their social/psychological needs (Steinberg, 2013), the current arrangement does not allow students to
demonstrate their strengths or benefit from the mix of strengths that would be present in a heterogeneous
group. In contrast, this group has a propensity to distract themselves and other students. While these
students are generally able to recover by obtaining the content on their own through working problems,
they impact the learning of students who do not have this ability. Reordering the groups will help reduce
the distracting communication and allow these students to use their understanding to help other students
while these students are in a better position to apply peer pressure to help these students with self
control.