April+Survey+Physical+Science+10

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= Reflection on Survey = This survey was administered in April to Mike's and my students for feedback on the Honors Challenge program. Together, we categorized the data and talked about next steps.

Highlights:
Several categories came from the responses to the last two questions: 1) "What could we change to make you more interested in completing HC assignments?" and 2) "If you could improve one thing about the HC program for next year, what would you do?" Mike and I discussed each category and what steps we should take from this survey. The other point we felt was important was that no significant negative feedback came out of this survey. We take that as a positive sign that HC is a program that students find to be working for them.
 * Less work
 * Several comments indicated they would like HC to be less work. While we disagree with this sentiment in general, we have decided to act on a common theme. We have required students to write a letter of interest to begin HC. We decided it makes sense for all students to write a letter of intent at the beginning of the program indicating if they are going to do HC or CP. This may be a subtle shift, but I think an important one. It will say from the beginning, it is not just more work to do HC. Everyone learns the same content in the course. That may mean that a few more students might not see the letter as a barrier for HC.
 * More help
 * Several comments related to seeking more clarity on HC assignments or having more help available for HC assignments. I think that HC sometimes is left for the end of the process in an assignment, and I can see that shifting the emphasis to it more will help students.
 * We agree that some of the HC assignments need more written explanations.
 * Some of the student comments indicated they wanted more exemplars. While we feel that these are appropriate in some contexts ("when it's done it should look like this"), giving exemplars for every assignment can restrict students' creativity and problem solving, skills we'd like HC students to improve over the course of the year. Perhaps more scaffolding should be done with this with more exemplars available at the beginning of the year and fewer as the year moves forward.
 * Students indicated that for test review sheets, they would like more clarity for what would be on CP and HC tests. Students would like more information to study from. We decided we can do that for the final.
 * More options
 * We want to improve a few more options for labs, for example adding some more sophistication to another motion lab in terms of graphing and data.

Data
Mike and I categorized the comments for the last two questions about the HC program in this data. media type="custom" key="6010681"

Summary of results
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