Physics notes – now with a full set of solutions

I may have mentioned that puting together the Junior Cert notes took rather a long time. Well it wasn’t much compared to how long it took to update the Leaving Cert notes.
For these I took all the exam papers from 2002 to 2009 at both higher level and ordinary level and broke up each question into the smallest chunks possible.
I then arranged these questions by topic, in the order in which the concepts appear in the notes themselves, so we’re left with a pretty comprehensive bank of questions.

Oh, and I typed up full solutions for these also.

This will hopefully be beneficial not only to students, but also to teachers (particularly new teachers) who want to make sure that they have all the material covered, and at the correct depth.

While it may have taken all Summer to put together, updating it each year shouldn’t prove too onerous.
Again, the intention is to see if it’s possible to publish this online for anyone to download as a booklet rather than coughing up beaucoup de moolah in these somewhat troubled times.  This would also involve replacing the odd copyright image with a more legimate substitute and problably sticking in some sample questions in most chapters also.

All in good time.

I also dug out some (okay – all) of the comments which teachers and students have sent my way over the last couple of years and put a link to it on the homepage – it is really is hugely rewarding to receive these, so if that’s you then thanks!
www.thephysicsteacher.ie

Nice resources for atomic bonding

A rather unorthodox approach to revising atomic bonding:


 
It dovetails nicely with one of the many free resources from absorblearning – in this case an animation of an oxygen atom bonding (covalently) with two hydrogen atoms to form a water molecule.

There are over 100 other free resources like this from the same site (you can see more on the right-hand side of the pages).
It would be ideal if one could link directly to the resourse but instead you have to click on the icon on the top left to arrive at the required distination. Just as well it’s worth the trip.
The plan is put links to most of these in the relevant junior chemistry page of thephysicsteacher.ie

Annnnnd we’re back

It’s taken a while (actually all Summer) but thephysicsteacher.ie now contains student notes on all topics on the Junior Cert Science syllabus.

Each chapter contains a copy of the relevant points from the syllabus at the beginning. This gives the student an overview of what the chapter is about and also acts as a check for both student and teacher to ensure we have everything covered before we finish.

There is then the main body which contains the notes in a relatively condensed form.

Next come the questions; here we have included every relevant question which has appeared on an exam paper at higher or ordinary level. These have been arranged to follow the order of the concepts in the notes themselves.

Each question has a reference to the year when the question appeared. Some questions come up repeatedly and this is readily apparent by noting the numbering of years at the top.

Next come the solutions. These are not just the answers but where necessary fully worked out solutions.

Finally there is a bank of miscellaneous questions which rounds of the chapter.

So what next?

Because it’s my first year using this approach it will take at least the year to road-test it and fine tune as I go along. This time next year it should be closer to a polished product.

I teach second- and third-years and so far we have never needed to look at a text-book. The hope is that next year we can spare parents the expense of purchasing science text-books for Junior Science.

Of course the notes still need to be photocopied and distributed, but at least we cut down considerably on paper by using narrow margins, reducing size by printing two pages onto one A4 and photocopying back to back, with the result that most chapters are on one double-sided page. Students seem to have little trouble with this approach although they do have to invest in a plastic folder to contain the notes.

It would be nice to think that we could work in a paperless classroom, but this would require all students to have their own laptop in class so I’m not holding my breath.

The wonderful people at CESI have been helping with the presentation and I can’t see any reason why the notes can’t be published as an online book after we have road-tested it.

It can be updated every year both to improve the quality and add extra exam questions as they appear. In particular I would like to develop the questions to include a lot more ‘higher order’ thinking rather than just simple recall.

It needs to be in ‘editable’ format to allow other teachers to adapt it to their own needs.

I also need to add interactive links to the Junior Chemistry and Junior Biology pages of the website; currently I have over one hundred waiting patiently in the wings; they range from average to priceless.

It’s all freely available to download. In fact to save teachers and/or students the trouble of downloading 45 different chapters I can’t see any reason why I can’t copy them to cd and post them – at least initially.

The website already contains a guide to teaching Junior Cert Physics by topic; it would be nice if this could be expanded to include Chemistry and Biology, but this would involve a contribution from a more knowledgeable source than I.

And what I really want to do is to have evolution permeate the entire Biology section  – after all could there be anything more ridiculous than teaching Biology without reference to the underlying template upon which all life is built?

That, and the fact that it’s only the greatest story ever told.

That’ll do for now.

Junior Cert Physics      Junior Cert Biology         Junior Cert Chemistry

Assessment: the tail that wags the dog

chasing tail

 

All this talk about whether leaving cert results or aptitude tests are better for gaining information about a student’s ability to become a doctor reminds me of the story of the drunk looking for his keys under the streetlight.

 

A cop walking his beat one night finds a drunk on his knees, searching for something on the street. The cop asks the drunk, “What are you doing?” “Looking for my car keys,” says the drunk. The cop asks, “Where did you lose your keys?” “I don’t know,” the man answers. The cop, a bit perplexed, asks, “Then, why are you looking here if you don’t know where you lost your keys?” Responds the drunk, “Because the light is better here, under the streetlight.”

 

Why does our education have such a focus on assessment? Because that’s the only bit we can put a number on.

And we do love to put numbers on things.

The danger arises when this very dubious practice becomes ingrained in us to such an extent that all the stakeholders assume it is a ‘natural’ process.

Certainly students associate ‘points’ with intelligence, and identify ‘good’ teachers as those whose students get ‘A’s.

Of course there are very valid reasons for doing this; the point is that in so doing we are reinforcing the notion that this is right (and again that word ‘natural’).

 

Assessment then turns into the tail that wags the dog.

 

Look at the aims and objectives of any syllabus at senior or junior level – they are full of wonderful aspirations.

This particular one can be found at the beginning of every leaving cert subject syllabus:

 

The general aim of education is to contribute towards the development of all aspects of the individual, including aesthetic, creative, critical, cultural, emotional, expressive, intellectual, for personal and home life, for working life, for living in the community and for leisure.

 

I wonder how much time authors spend reading this when they set out to write their textbooks.

 

Palaeontologist and popular-science writer Stephen Jay Gould looked at the origin of the I.Q. test in his wonderful book ‘The mismeasure of man’.

He used the term ‘reification’ to describe the fallacy of putting a number on something that couldn’t be quantified (in this case intelligence) and with this very simple process an incredible transformation takes place. Because the concept has now got a number everybody assumes that the concept must be measureable and therefore the concept must be valid.

 

Wasn’t it Margaret Mead who said that she was taking her daughter out of school so that she could get an education?

The hollow Einstein face

We have an illusion that consists of a hollow face of Einstein which seems to be looking at you whether you are looking at the front of it or the back. It’s very impressive. I use it to remind students (and myself) that there is a heck of a lot out there that we still don’t understand, even if we like to pretend otherwise.
The illusion can be purchased from grand-illusions.com, one of the very best sources for all types of illusions.

So when New-Scientist posted a video on how this was being used to test for schizophrenia, I thought perhaps it was time to check it out again (apparently people suffering from schizophrenia don’t notice the effect).

 

New podcast on exam technique

exam technique

I have uploaded a new podcast on exam technique. It’s 19 minutes long so I may have overdone it somewhat.

The document itself is available here and both podcast and document are on the revision page of the website.

You might notice that there is a gap where the itunes link should be; that’s because I’ve forgotten how to incorporate the podcast into itunes. It’ll come back to me some day.

I have also fixed all the links on top of each webpage (I hope) and played with the main banner on the homepage.  It still looks very amateurish – one of these days I’ll get it right.

Junior Cert Physics Resources

juniorphysics1

I have tended to neglect the Junior Cert end of thephysicsteacher.ie

Hopefully this has now been rectified. Or at any rate it’s a start.
The interactive links were there already but not easily accessable, and were all on one long page.
The section which took longest to prepare was the ‘Tips for Teachers’ section. Hopefully this will prove useful to Biology and Chemistry teachers, and any new teachers, particularly hdip and trainee teachers.
Being more organised may also encourage me to be a bit more adventurous with the investigative approach rather than just telling students what to do for each so-called ‘experiment’.

I had my own school in mind with our own resources, but tried to be as general as possible.
The links on top are as likely to take you  into a parallel universe as anywhere else, but that’s for another day.

I am particularly proud of the ‘Teachers’ Tips’ column; each section of the Junior Physics syllabus has been teased out seperately with comments which I hope prove useful. Having everything itemised like this means I can follow this guide as I teach them myself and alter sections as needs be. Perhaps others may even get involved and offer constructive criticism on sections which they approach differently.

As with all advice, it is more a work in progress than a finished product. I would like to include a set of equipment for each section which teachers could cross-check in advance, along with a suggested length of time for teaching each chapter and sub-topic.
Next up would be a set of higher-order questions and a variety of teaching approaches, with particular emphasis on Assessment for Learning.

Electricity in particular requires special attention. It is one of the most popular topics on the exam paper and I imagine one of the trickiest to teach for the non-specialist teacher.

But it’s a start.

Feel free to download them to your own pc and adapt them to suit your own school needs. 

Let’s put the swine flu in perspective

The total number of deaths in World War One was 16 million.
The number of deaths as a result of the Spanish flu which followed in 1918 was somewhere between 30 and 80 million.

In the 14th century the Black Death is estimated to have killed 75 million people (including anywhere from 30% to 60% of Europe’s population – including Ireland).

 Which isn’t to say that the current Swine Flu shouldn’t be taken seriously, just that when it comes to risk our ability to be objective tends to go out the window.

The Black Death by Philip Ziegler is a book well worth reading for the historical and in particular the social and political implications of this desease.

Leaving Cert Physics Notes: now with experiments

My homework over the Easter break was to write up all the Leaving Cert Physics Mandatory Experiments, including diagrams, sources of error and precautions.
I have incorporated them into the notes (they are at the very end) so now there’s no excuse for not having them written up on time!

They do tend to add bulk to what gets printed out and photocopied, which is not a good thing.
I would also like to have all the pages automatically numbered for easy reference but to do so pushes up the text at the bottom of the page considerably and results in even more pages being required.
Anybody know of a way around this?

I used  four different sites to help me:

  1. Tom Healy’s site at thealy.com
  2. Tim Brophy’s site on teachnet
  3. Sean Foley’s site at mathsphysics.com
  4. The physics pages at slss.ie

Thanks to all concerned.

If they’re any use to you feel free to use them as they are or copy, paste and adjust them as required. You don’t need to let me know, but it would be nice. To see when and where the individual experiments came up on the exam paper just check the test questions which are also in the notes; they are all cross-referenced with the marking schemes which accompany them.
Together with the related syllabus extracts I hope that makes up the complete package.
Leaving Cert Physics Notes

🙂

Horrendous:Average mark in Junior Science H.L written exam is 55%

I was browsing through the Chief Examiner’s report (as one does) for the Junior Cert science exam 2006 and found buried amongst all the text and statistics the following unbelievable nugget: the average mark for the written exam was 55%.
I couldn’t find any data on 2007 or 2008, so I don’t know if things have changed in the meantime or not.

55%

This is after three years work. In hindsight it would have been more useful if it was one percentage point lower in that we could then conclude that the average mark didn’t merit an honour and maybe drastic action could have been taken. Maybe for that matter action has been taken, but again I couldn’t find any comment or reference to this anythere.

I can see why this statistic didn’t cause a furore at the time: the overall mark turned out to be 67%, so most students would have been (relatively) happy with that. This was due to the combining of the written exam with the two other sections.
Coursework A: (recording of experiment work over the three years) is worth 10% of the overall mark and the average mark here was 98%.
Coursework B: (based on a report of two seperate investigations) is worth 25% of the overall mark and the average mark here was 85%.

But stilll.
55%
Shocking.

The standard explanantion for this is that students no longer have a choice in the paper, so all questions need to be answered. This is certainly a large contributory factor, but when I looked over the papers for 2006, 2007 and 2008 there was another shock. I concentrated on Physics and found that the hardest topic – Electricity – accounted for over one fifth of all the marks on the physics sections.
Three other sections featured very strongly; Heat, Light and Energy, and all other topics were then very much hit-or-miss as regards whether they featured or not.

Some of the questions within each section were also ridiculous. I have listed some of the worst offenders in a submission to the editor of SCIENCE, the in-house journal for members of the ISTA (Irish Science Teachers Association). The full article can be accessed below: on the top-right there is the option to toggle for the full screen.

I included in the document a link to this posting so hopefully we will receive some feedback (the next edition of the journal goes out towards the end of May) .

What think you?