Inertia Prac Report Marking (NMHS Week 3: Wednesday)

Right before I took over teaching this class, they had completed their inertia prac. So the first few weeks of teaching primarily involved me helping them write up their summative reports on this prac.

The prac involved rolling a car down a ramp, colliding it with a barrier at the bottom of the ramp so that a makeshift “passenger” would go flying, and measuring the distance the passenger flew. Adjusting the angle of the ramp allowed for the impact of speed on the crash severity, measured by how far the passenger flew, to be investigated.

Over the weekend I marked just about the whole classes inertia prac reports, which they had completed right before I started teaching them and I had been helping them write right from the start of placement. Here are direct links to the inertia prac report task sheet, for and the scaffold they had to help them structure their report.

I haven’t include any of the reports themselves as they include identifying details of the students, but I can include a couple of anonymised samples of student work. This is the variables section of one students report, which showed an excellent grasp of the concepts surrounding variables.

This is the materials and method section of another student’s report, which showed excellent attention to detail.

Overall neither of these prac reports where perfect, but each had sections that where excellent, and sections that demonstrated a lack of understanding as well — highlighting the gaps in individual students knowledge which I then went on to address in future lessons with these students.