Mosart

I think it is very important to use formative assessment to help get an idea of your students' preconceptions. This will help inform the teacher on how they should move forward. If a teacher doesn't know about these preconceptions, then the teacher will not be able to effectively reroute the students' thinking and change that preconception.

NGSS and formative assessment

NGSS:
The main idea of NGSS is to get students actually doing the science themselves to understand the scientific concepts. It is also very inquiry driven. This is very important for my future classroom because it means that science class will look much more like a science lab (which I find exciting!). When I was in elementary, middle, and high school all we did was memorize facts and an ocassionally experiment if we were lucky. These experiments weren't like real science though because we just followed steps to get results and stopped there. NGSS seems to be promoting the type of science lab that I experienced while in biology and chemistry in college. We weren't finished with our experiments when we got our results. We had to explain why we got those results, how we got those results, and what did I mean. I'm enthralled that this is what NGSS is pushing because it shows students the joy of science much better than just memorizing things about science.

Formative Assessment:
They mean that formative assessment is much more useful for both me as a teacher and my future students. It shows me where they are which helps me make the decision of where we need to go from there. I think it is an amazing idea to include the students in the goal setting of their learning because that shows them where they should be working towards. This promotes self-evaluation which is a wonderful lifelong skill that my students could then apply to real life situations. I think that summative assessment is useless because it's not used to inform instructual decisions. If testing isn't used to help our students improve, that time could be used better elsewhere.

Sweater article

I liked this article a lot because it helped show me that creating a disequilibrium once in a child's brain is not typically enough to uproot their misconceptions. As I read the article I found myself wondering the same things that the teacher was wondering while letting her students experiment over and over again. I like the suggestions that the article game about asking open ended questions that could lightly guide the students' next experiments so they are not just doing the same experiment over and over again. I believe that it is important to let children experiment but just letting them test the same thing over and over again hoping to get the same results will not result in a conceptual change in understanding. This is why those open ended questions are very important to help the students reach that disequilibrium that motivates them to make sense of things. I also found the end of the article to be very good because letting students experiment on their own ideas gives them an ownership of the experiments and helps foster an interest in science.