The elimination of tracking has come up in comments here. This caught my eye on twitter.
Comparing Academically Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Groups in an Active Learning Physics Class

Student feedback, pretest, and posttest data indicated that low- and middle-performing students benefitted the most from academically homogeneous groups. Results for the one full semester of the study and the rationale for discontinuing are presented.

The study is with college students.

The results were evidently striking:

However, as will be explained, the study was terminated halfway through the second semester as it had become sufficiently apparent that placing students in academically heterogeneous groups was negatively impacting both their learning and their overall experience to the point that it seemed unethical to continue. At that point, all students were shifted to academically homogeneous groups.

There are some observations of dynamics:

In the heterogeneous room, the students labeled as high performers had substantially greater gains than the other students in that room. Our observations and their feedback indicated that in most groups the high-performing student was likely doing most of the thinking for the group. The other students had a strong tendency to defer to that student to let him or her figure things out, and then explain it to them (or just copy down their work).

Gosh. Really?
And guess what? Being in the heterogenous group doesn’t make the students feel good about themselves!

For example, from one heterogeneous group, a low-performing student wrote “I feel as if I am not smart enough for my group. Both of my groupmates are highly intelligent and I feel as if I slow them down. Therefore, I am afraid to ask them questions and feel less adept.”

Admittedly, this is not high school or elementary school. But it does seem to be an attempt to actually collect and observe. It’s also not tracking– everyone was taking the same course. But it was sorting groups to do work together. Sorting by ability was better.

I have a FOIA question.

As many of you know I’m tutoring high school physics. I have students from several different schools. Each school uses a somewhat different method of teaching physics, goes at different paces and so on. Naturally, I am curious to know the distribution of outcomes on the final AP Physics exams at each school.

Motivated by curiosity, I wanted to see what sorts of reports schools get and found this:
Report Descriptions.

I think the Five-Year School Summaries contain the information I would be curious about. (I’m only curious about AP Physics scores, though there may be other people curious about other courses.)

Do you people think anonymized scores for AP Physics tests is something that would be accessible under FOIA? (This is assuming the school downloaded them from the college board and retained them, which I think most would.)

Real question btw. Of course you are also free to discuss whether such a request would be useful, obnoxious and so on. ( I am perfectly aware that many teachers will consider it obnoxious. How their students did on standardized tests in their classes is something teachers typically don’t want the public to access because they feel people rate teachers this way. Of course teachers aren’t wrong about this. That said: I’m still curious. My reasons are not really rating teachers, but more that I would like to know how students in Illinois really do do, especially those in my county. )

Anyway, my main question right now is whether it’s something that I ought to be able to get with a sufficiently carefully worded request?

Open thread.

I’m trying to create multiple choice questions using the “formulas type” question in moodle. I’m force to make a compromise and I’m trying to decide if the compromise is sufficiently bad to make the question “suck”.

So, my question is: Does this question suck? If yes, tell me what sucks about it.

I’d be more specific, but I”m trying to gauge if the compromise works not. Suffice it to say, I’m not really asking for proof-reading. If there’s a fixable typo, I want to fix it, so let me know. But if the the thing I consider sub-optimal doesn’t make it actually suck, I’m going to go ahead and make a bunch of these.

(BTW: there are lots of things good about this question. The formulas question permits lots of randomization, so as coded this question has 5*2*4*4*4*2 variants. It can ask for the impulse or the change in momentum, it has different exponents on the powers, it has different coefficients and so on. So I would really like for the thing that bugs me to be something that most people think doesn’t suck. But if it sucks, I don’t want to make a while bunch of these.)

Update: Thanks to Bernat Martinez, I can now avoid the thing I thought sucked. Here’s a different question. Notice the answer options now contain units. Yay!

I was asking some of my tutees about their grades, and whether they knew which topics they might need to review for comprehensive finals and so on. Two of my students in AP Physics at their schools said none of the tests they have taken this year have been graded yet. That is to say: even tests they took early in September have not been graded. One has taken four unit tests and zero have been graded.

Other tutees say tests take a long time to grade, so for example, one has gotten is test on Kinematics from early September graded, but none of the other tests have been graded. So, that’s 3 kids with tests graded so s_l_o_w_l_y that I would deem “slow grading” to be seriously counterproductive to learning. All these kids are in public schools. (The kids at Benet Academy which is private report somewhat slow grading of labs, but tests are graded fairly promptly– as in within a week. Though not optimum, I’d say slowish grading of labs has sort of always been fairly common. )

I haven’t been “grilling” all of them to get specific statistics– but basically, more teachers than I would have expected seem to give a really, really, really low priority to getting tests graded in a reasonable time, or perhaps are so very, very busy and overworked they can’t manage to find time to grade them.

Those of you with kids in high school: Is zero tests being graded even as Thanksgiving approaches within the range “new normal”? Or have I encountered a statistical anomaly?

Preface: A subset of my students like extra practice problems. Those taking AP tests especially would like some that have a “similar flavor” to the ones that actually appear on the AP Physics tests. (Make no mistake: certain “types” do appear on tests because none tests “all possible physics knowledge and skillzzzz” but rather emphasize certain predictable things.

So, I like to make problems that are “like” AP problems and store them in a Moodle database. (Moodle is a Learning Management System). For certain problems, I’ve found using R really helps me make tons of variations that are useful for student practice. Naturally, I now have a challenge. I’ve hunted around a little to try to find an R solution, but I figured: Why not just ask? Someone out there might know the answer.

The question: Can I output both the text and an image to a file in R? I do know how to output text and have used that to create files I can just upload into Moodle. It’s very convenient. I also know how to create and save an image to a file. But these are separate files. I don’t know how to add an image to the text file.

More specific motivation. If I could add both text and image to a single file, I could create a “file” that contained both the image and all the text for a “question” and save it. Then I could run the script, create a bunch of questions and upload them. This would save a lot of time in creating a trove of similar questions that can be used to let students practice. (I tend to find I need at least 3 versions of each “thing”. The first is to “show”. The second is for them to “do” in my presence. The third is to be able to provide fresh practice when at home. If you squint you will notice the text in all the questions to the right is the same. In problems 7-9, force is always positive. So it tests understanding Impulse = area under F(t) graph, but a student who doesn’t know what to do with negative force might get away with not having their lack of knowledge detected. So: that’s the minimum 3. Then I have 3 where F(t) is always negative. Them 3 where it is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. That makes a minimum of 9 required. I create graphs for all 9 with the same script but I have more manual stuff to do than I’d prefer. So if I could have the script just create a file containing everything, save it and upload, I’d like that.

Open Thread: but priority on the R question or things related to education, tutoring, teaching, teaching physics and so on.

Previously, a reader asked if he should advise his son to take or avoid AP Physics 1. There are a lot of things to consider when making the decision. Among them, I think all kids and parents should be aware of when deciding on whether a kid takes a particular AP test. The College Board has recently posted score distributions and a kid at reddit kindly did some processing. The College Board considers a 3 “passing”. Here’s a diagram ranking which classes had the highest and lowest percentage scores of 3 or greater:

Students on reddit are debating why some classes have high pass rates relative to others. I think there are lots of reasons and will be happy to share in comments. But what I wanted people pondering kids choices for High School physics to see is which class has the lowest pass rate: AP Physics 1.