Baseline 3-2-1 Summary

This week in my middle school science class I gave my students a short article on scientific method and asked them to complete three tasks. The article was one page, highly structured and scores about grade 6.5 using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula

Three Tasks

1. Read the article
2. Take notes
3. Answer 8 questions

Two Days

Students were give 70 minutes of class time split across two days.

The purpose of this activity was to get a baseline on where they were starting from in terms of their ability to expository text independently.


Results (out of 7 students)

• Following directions is not a strength of this group.  They needed a lot of verbal repetition of the three tasks (even with the list written on the board).  One student did not take notes as part of his completion of the tasks.
• Out of 11 ideas I recorded on my notes, students identified between 3 and 7 of those ideas
• Only 1 student put a title on their notes
• 2 students had trouble putting notes in their own words and just copied long sentences of information
• Only one student completed a summary at the bottom of their notes (a la Cornell Notes)
• 1 student did not even start to answer the questions, he spun his wheels on day one unable to start the task. On day two, I cut the task in half and gave him a starting point and he was able to take notes.
• 1 student answered all 5 of the questions that could be found directly in the passage correctly, but was unable to correctly answer the 3 questions that require application or making connections.
• 1 student did not answer any of the direct questions correctly, but had great answers to the questions requiring application and connections.
• The other students fell in between those two extremes with mixed results.

One priority follow up

In class this week I will hand back their notes with feedback only (no grades) and we will develop a class resource of what is expected for notetaking.  I will post a picture of this resource after it is developed.



This 3-2-1 Summary is part of the weekly #MtbosChallenge