I am a student teacher in sixth grade earth science. My question is about makeup exams.  I have several ideas, but can you suggest other systems or procedures for allowing students to make up exams?
—Dawn, San Jose, California
Student absences are a given. It’s frustrating when students miss a class (or two or three) due to illness, field trips, or family situations. It’s hard to find time for students to make up assignments, especially tests, labs, and projects.
In your note, you listed your ideas for students to make up a test when they return to school. Two important considerations regarding make-up tests are the format and content. Will you give the same test as a make-up or an alternate version? How will you ensure the alternate version assesses the same objectives as the original test?
Based on my experiences, I have some thoughts and questions on these ideas:

1. Students must schedule an appointment with the teacher to make up the exam. I suspect this is a very common strategy with teachers. But do your students have study halls or resource time during the day when they can make up work? What about before or after school? (My school had a majority of bus students, so these were not options.) If students don’t have time during the day, you could ask the student to do the test during class time when he or she returns from the absence. If the rest of the class would be distracting, the student could go to another classroom or the library (talk to your colleague beforehand to set this up). My principal also had a conference room in the office he made available for students as a quiet place to work. One drawback is that when the student makes up the test, he or she is missing what is happening in the class.

2. Take an online test or computer-based test. This option assumes students have access to the technology and you have the appropriate resources to create, administer, and view the results of an online test. Do you typically use an online format, or will you have to create this version of the test separate from a paper-and-pencil one? Where and when will the students complete this? What if other students would prefer this alternative?

3. Do a take-home test. Would this be the same test or an alternate version? Do students who take the test in class have access to their notes, the textbook, the internet, or each other? If not, how will you regulate what happens at home when these resources are readily available? What is the time frame for completing it? What about other students who would like this option?

4. Substitute a project in place of the exam. If you do this, you’ll have to be careful that the project reflects the same learning objectives as the traditional test. For example, if your test focuses on recall of factual knowledge or written explanations but the project requires a higher level of thinking or creativity then you’re assessing different learning objectives. Decide in advance how much time to allow for the project. Would students who were not absent prefer or benefit from projects?

A strategy that worked for me was having “transition time” between units of instruction, usually a day or two. During this time, students could make up the test, revise lab reports, re-take the test (if that is an option), finish projects, or engage in extension activities.
As a student teacher, you can observe how your mentor/cooperating teacher handles this issue.
Photo:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/46632302@N06/4279477491/

The gas chromatograph, until recently, has been a founding member in the exclusive club of scientific instrumentation that lived only in the rarified air of serious scientific laboratories. Other members of the club include the electron microscope, the mass spectrometer, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and of course the cyclotron.
Below is a picture of a mass spectrometer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Besides being wildly complex, it takes up the better part of a room, and leaves little to the engineer’s imagination given all the exposed wires, tubes, and components.



For decades, a magic box was the main thing between students and real-time data collection. The magic box went by many names including Universal Lab Interface, MultiPurpose Lab Interface, Serial Box Interface, LabPro, LabQuest, GoLink, LabQuest Mini, and LabQuest2. But in all cases, the excitement over the interfaces provided students with connectivity to instrumentation that in most cases was possible through other means albeit filled with limitations. It has been a while since truly illusive classroom measurements have become possible, and the Mini GC moves the inquiry excitement beyond the interface and into the instrumentation.

I noticed the first hints of a change in the winds of gas chromatography, or GC for short, a couple years after the terror attacks of 9/11. In discussion with a local hazardous materials team I learned that a suitcase-sized GC was onboard their truck. I just had to see it and learn about its operation. A few caveats however. First, the “suitcase” was huge and heavy, but did have a handle and hinges like a suitcase. Second, the suitcase GC cost over $100,000. Third, it was not fast or easy to use, maintain, nor inexpensive to operate. Since that time, GCs have dropped in price and size and increased in speed and number of features, but still a $55,000 13kg suitcase is out of reach of almost every high school. But drop a magnitude and the science teacher’s day just got brighter. What about a $1800 1.3kg GC that can communicate with an iPad? Now we’re talking!
The Vernier Mini GC Plus not only opens up a brave new world of high school/college-level instrumentation, but pushes the envelope of student expectations into uncharted territory; a new intellectual playspace from which there is no turning back.

I belive the Mini GC marks a conceptual change is the dedication to science teaching by a technology company. Many of us are quite happy, overwhelmed perhaps, with all the available probeware, sensors, interfaces, and output options, but the arrival of the Mini GC, whether intentional or not, has raised the bar of imagination for anyone on the delivery or receiving end of high school science.
In a nutshell, the Mini GC Plus is a real gas chromatograph that is smaller and lighter than a six-pack of pop (or soda if you live in that region of the US). The Mini GC does have some limitations in the types of samples it can process, but the mechanics and workflow are true GC.
The Vernier Mini GC Plus connects via USB to a computer running LoggerPro3, or to a LabQuest. If used with an LabQuest 2, the datastream from the Mini GC can be wirelessly collected and analyzed on an iPad running the Graphical Analysis App or viewed in a web browser.

 

 
An entire GC run can take as little as five minutes, or much longer if complex compounds are analyzed. The steps are basic since the instrument does the initial work (which is much of the magic of the elite instruments of science). When connected to Vernier software, the GC is autodetected and identified as such, and a window filled with setting choices appears. A couple microliters of a liquid are injected into the GC’s port at the same moment that the data collection run is started. As the volatiles are cooked off in the GC’s oven, a signal of concentration and duration is processed into a spike or spikes on a graph. From that point the statics features of the software can be used for further analysis.
The Mini GC, according to Vernier, “is an instrument for separating, analyzing, and identifying substances contained in a volatile liquid or gaseous sample. The Mini GC Plus can detect and distinguish between families of compounds, including alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, aromatic hydrocarbons, carboxylic acids, esters, ethers, and nitriles.”
A GC operates by heating an extremely small amount of a liquid whereby the individual compounds in the liquid separate out over time yielding both definable characteristics and percentages of the total amount of material analyzed. By cross-referencing the results with knowns, specific compounds and mixtures can be identified.
A webpage at Oregon State University describes this process well as the process being, “similar to a running race where a group of people begin at the starting line, but as the race proceeds, the runners separate based on their speed. The chemicals in the mixture separate based on their volatility. In general, small molecules travel more quickly than larger molecules.”
The workflow for analyzing acetone with the Mini GC, the LabQuest2 and an iPad is presented in the video below recorded at the Vernier exhibitor booth at the 2013 NSTA National Conference in San Antonio, TX.
Now that the Mini GC has raised the high school classroom science teaching bar to what was once an unimaginable level, we can only hope that other members of the exclusive scientific instrumentation club will be available for the cost of less than two football helmets (the Head Impact Telemetry System kind of football helmet, of course.)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0tBIW-hV9I[/youtube]
 

A pile of sand, a sandbox or a sensory table full of sand are tools for imaginative play, sensory exploration and science investigations.  In the April 2013 issue of Science and Children, the Early Years column, I wrote about how children wondered what made a series of cone-shaped pits in a line in the sandbox. Their question came after a long period of unstructured play and it inspired an investigation into how water can move sand.
As children work with dry and wet sand, they notice and make use of the differences due to the properties of water:

• Wet sand sticks together and can be made into deep holes and tall “mountains.” Footprints and other impressions are easy to make and see in wet sand.
• Dry sand can slide off a shovel and flow into a hole or fill a bucket.

The water molecules adhering to sand grains and each other aren’t visible to the children but they can explore this property, and think about how that is the same or different from the way other materials behave.
Some teachers bury small objects, such as shells, for children to discover while digging. In nature, sand and other sediments cover and bury objects and previously laid down layers of sediment.
Using a magnifier children can see the shape of the sand grains and notice different colors.
Children may notice the temperature differences between sand in direct sunlight and sand in the shade.
Impressions made by feet or objects can be filled with wet plaster of Paris (mixed by an adult in a plastic bag) and later pulled out of the sand to reveal the cast of the shape. Some fossils are formed when the space that a dead plant or animal occupied is filled with minerals over time.
Early childhood programs that have a water source that can be used with the sandbox provide an opportunity for children to create and observe water flow. As children work, ask them to tell you what they notice is happening. Record their words, have them write or draw about their observations. This documentation, along with their recollection of the experiences, is their evidence for any statements they make about the properties of sand and the force of moving water. Talking about what they observe is an important part of learning. Sharing their ideas about why and how is part of “doing science.”
These early childhood investigations and experiences support later learning about properties of liquids, engineering design, earth science concepts such as erosion and sedimentation, energy, forces and motion, and systems. Take a look at the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for K-grade 2 and see how the performance expectations (and the practices, core ideas and crosscutting concepts they were developed from) are supported by sandbox play and investigations. The NSTA has guides to the NGSS to help us use them in teaching children from early childhood and up.

The 2013 National Science Foundation (NSF) report Women, Minorities, and Persons With Disabilities in Science and Engineering indicates that “U.S. citizens and permanent residents earned higher numbers of science and engineering (S&E) doctorates in 2009 than they did in 1999. Since 2008, they’ve earned more doctorates in S&E fields than in non-S&E fields.” In 2010, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued the  Encouraging Minorities to Pursue Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Careers briefing.
These efforts indicate that more and more high school science teachers are and will be teaching students with disabilities in advanced science classes. If you teach Advanced Placement (AP), International Baccalaureate (IB), or honors science courses, you are likely experienced and knowledgeable about science, but you may have little or no experience with special education. Conversely, many special education teachers have little or no experience in teaching advanced science courses.
In their newly published book, Including Students With Disabilities in Advanced Science Classes, authors Lori Howard and Elizabeth Potts explain that advanced or accelerated courses are not usually team taught with a special education teacher and that those teachers may not have ready access to special educators to share strategies for fostering success for those students with disabilities.
This book is a unique resource for teachers of advanced science courses. The authors break down the essentials as follows:

• Basic Special Education Terms and Laws
• Working with the Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) Team
• Classroom Considerations: Behavior and Instruction
• Labs
• Assistive Technology and Your Classroom

The openness and willingness of teachers to welcome students with disabilities into the classroom is often identified as a key component for student success. As I read this book, I wondered what teachers facing this situation for the first time would be most concerned about. If  you have already taught students with disabilities in your advanced science classes, how would you advise someone to prepare? What was your experience?
Note: This book is also available as an e-book.