Category Archives: Social Studies
Culminating Project for Grade 9 Humanities at SIS
Photo by YoTut on Flickr
During this last week of school, grade 9 Humanities students at my school presented the results of their research and the media they created for the Many Faces of Shenzhen culminating project, which was part of a unit on Urbanization. From what I saw of the process and products, it was an excellent project-based learning experience for the students, involving digital storytelling and an emphasis on a relatively new and quickly growing city in China populated with mostly migrant workers- Shenzhen.
The class and this project was facilitated by my colleague Victoria Robins. She defined the goal of the project to create a museum style exhibit, focusing on one migrant worker or long time Shenzhen resident. The person who the students interviewed should have lived in the city for at least 5 years, be willing to share their story, and be willing to share appropriate photos or other ‘primary sources’ to enrich the students’ exhibit. The final product had to be digital, but she let the students choose the digital medium. Students mostly created PowerPoints, Movies, Prezis, and/or Glogster posters. Prior to the creation process, Victoria had her students evaluate other digital exhibits out in the world to get a sense of what these types of products look like in actual exhibitions. Many of students also had to do Chinese-English translations in the process, so the project worked their language skills, as well.
Victoria is already a strong technology integrator and project-based learning facilitator, so she didn’t seek much assistance from me. As the high school technology integrator I only assisted Victoria by helping her deepen her understanding of how to find and cite Creative Commons licensed work so that she could properly guide the students in this part of the research and creation process. She is planning to publish some of the products the students created, so she wanted the students to ensure their products are legally viable in regards to the incorporated media (photos and music) beyond the original media they capture or create. She reported that most of the students grew their understanding of this process, and from what I saw in the exhibit, most of the students did ok with this aspect. Of course, they are still learning about Creative Commons as it was new for most of them, so a few students had still used copyrighted material.
Overall, the exhibition was great. The students presented many fascinating stories and insights about Shenzhen and some of the migrant workers living here. I know my colleagues and other community members who visited the exhibition were equally impressed with the students’ work.
Here are some of the student created videos for the project:
Below is a brief video I created about the exhibition of the final media related to the project:
IB Psychology Internal Assessment
The Internal Assessment (IA) process within the International Baccalaureate (IB) Diploma Program (DP) is one of the many reasons I like the Diploma Program. A couple of years ago I wrote this post about the IB Information Technology in a Global Society (ITGS) IA project, which is a fantastic, authentic, problem-solving, and client-based process. Now that I’ve been teaching IB Psychology for a couple of years now, I want to express my similar exuberance for the authentic internal assessment learning process that occurs in this class.
Image Licensed from Shutterstock
The IB Psychology IA has the students doing a simple replication of a known psychology experiment. In essence, the students do an experiment and write a research report the same way an actual research/experimental psychologist would do and report. The students have to follow the same kind of ethical guidelines real psychologists follow, including getting informed consent from and maintaining strict confidentiality of their participants. The students have to work with a clear and measurable independent and dependent variable, so they can’t just do a survey (Higher Level students do study qualitative research methods- observations, interviews, case studies- separately from this IA process). They have to delineate their methodology, design, and procedure clearly enough that anyone reading their work would be able to replicate it. With their gathered data in hand, they need to analyze the results, explaining the significance in context of their research environment and in comparison to the original researchers results/conclusions. Lastly, they draw a conclusion that relates to the hypothesis they presented in the introduction.
The Higher Level (HL) students have to do a little bit more work than the Standard Level (SL) students in the IA process. HLs have to do a review of the literature relevant to their research topic as part of the introduction whereas SLs don’t. The HLs also have to do an inferential statistics test (Chi Squared, Mann Whitney U, or Wilcoxon Signed Ranks) as part of the analysis of the results. The SL only have to do a central tendency (mean, median, mode, standard deviation) calculation. As we know, studying statistical methods is very important to understanding and making informed decisions about many different issues occurring in today’s world. So, it’s nice that this requirement is included in a Group 3 course.
There are some limitations as to what they can do, however; thus, the emphasis on simple in the second paragraph. Students can only manipulate one independent variable. Students can’t use animals, nor can they replicate any experiment involving unjustified deception, invasion of privacy, or inappropriate use of information technology. Students also have to take care that the participants don’t experience any physical and/or emotional pain. If any participants experience any discomfort, they must be allowed to withdraw at any time. Students can use children as participants, but they must get informed consent from the children’s parent/guardian. Finally, there is a word count limit to their report: HLs get 1500 – 2000 words, while SLs get 1000 – 1500 words.
Though this process is very academic, it is authentic to what real research experimental psychologists do. There is critical thinking and rigor involved throughout the whole process and the students are expected to reflect on their design and methodology and consider possible extensions. Moreover, since students get choice about what experiment they replicate (as long as it falls within the guidelines), there tends to be a high level of engagement in the process, as well.
Below is a video that overviews most of the experiments the students are replicating this year.
