From: Maurice Hayon <mhayon1@gmail.com>
Date: April 25, 2008 1:57:33 PM EDT (CA)
To: Dan MacIsaac <danmacisaac@mac.com>
Subject: 690 Project

Hi Dan,
 
After I tried unsuccessfully to limit my taxonomy of misconceptions to only a few topics, I decided on doing my project on a different topic mainly because Arons, Knight, and other authors from various TPT articles provide more misconceptions per topic than I could have ever provided.
 
So my masters project is going to be on an assessment tool that I created called Relating Representations in Kinematics (RRK).  We learned in PHY 620 that there are 4 different ways to represent motion--verbally (V), mathematically (M), graphically (G), and diagrammatically (dot diagrams, D).  According to many authors (Arons, Knight, Beichner, and Hake just to name a few), students need to know how to relate one interpretation of motion to another in order to master their understanding of kinematics.  This assessment tool is only 4 questions long, but each question includes a combination of relating interpretations.  For example:
 
Question 1 has the format
 
G, V, M, D  
 
Students must look at either a position, velocity, or acceleration vs. time graph and must explain the motion verbally.  They must then take the verbal information to answer a mathematical problem.  Finally, they must draw dot diagrams to represent the same motion.  Since students must graph something 3 times, there are 6 problems per question.  So there are actually 24 problems for this assessment.
 
Mathematically, there should be 24 different ways to arrange these 4 representations, however, most of the combinations repeats itself, for example:
 
G, V, M, D
 
G, V, D, M     although the combination is different, students are relating a verbal representation from the graphical for both questions
 
Therefore, the format for the assessment is:
 
G, V, M, D
 
V, D, G, M
 
D, M, V, G
 
M, G, D, V

This ensures that the students will be assessed on every possible way to relate the representations with the minimum amount of questions so that it is possible to use this assessment as a full period exam.  I will also give this exam to my students and collect their data for further analysis, but I think it'ill be too long of a project to include that part in.
 
-Mo
 
P.S.  Sorry for the delay. Although I love the Sherwood & Chabay course, it's extremely time consuming as is PHY 500. For the past 4 months I've been juggling my time between those two courses and developing the curriculum for our new APC mechanics class in our school.  I guess I didn't realize how overwhelming this all is when I signed up for it.