APPENDIX B

APPENDIX B

Information on Portfolio Entries Other Than Exercise Write-Ups

Introduction

Your instructor is interested in your success in this course. Success in this course does not just mean earning a passing grade, it also means understanding the major concepts of the course and developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills. With success in mind, your instructor is requiring you to use the following approaches in this course. Many students have used them in whole or in part at various times to their advantage. These approaches include Dialogue-Style Note Taking, Reading Responses, and keeping a Course-Related Scrapbook.

Dialogue-Style Class Note Taking

In this class, and in most others, good class notes are important for effective learning. Good class notes are complete, thorough, and personal. Many students have particular difficulty with the thorough and personal aspects of note taking.

Thorough notes stitch together more than just what the instructor covers in class that day. They make connections between previously covered material; they anticipate information that will follow; and they indicate troublesome places where you must return to the reading or ask the instructor for clarification. Good notes are multi-layered. They don’t just happen in class but depend on re-reading and reviewing your notes and adding supplemental comments.

Personal notes are more than just recorded facts. Many students make the mistake of only copying down what the instructor says or writes on the board. Having copied this information, they believe they have done their job. But when the time comes to review for an exam or to complete a project, they look at their neatly copied notes and discover they have no idea what the notes mean.

What many students have not done is the most important step in learning: translating what the course is teaching into their own language and making the language of the course their own. Successful learners translate the notes from the board or book into their own everyday language. The process resembles having a dialogue or conversation, asking questions and getting answers, shuttling back and forth from the strange new technical terminology of the course to more familiar terms. This makes the information personal. Some experts believe that we really don’t know something until we can explain or teach it to someone else. When we personalize the language, we explain the material to ourselves we teach ourselves.

Dialogue Note Taking

To create dialogue notes, take your sheet of notebook paper and about one-third of the distance from the left side of the sheet, draw a line from top to bottom. At first you will write only on the right side of the page. The unused space in the dialogue notes format encourages you to come back later and interact with the material in order to make connections as well as to formulate questions that (1) anticipate test questions or (2) that you can ask to clarify materials and get help discovering relationships between materials. After you have gotten use to the process, adjust the technique to meet your own needs and strengths.

In your dialogue notes, you are expected to do more than just record the facts presented in the class. You must interact with the ideas presented in the class. Here are ways to interact with the materials and information.

Selecting/Highlighting: This involves identifying key terms or ideas by circling, underlining, or highlighting them. Many students use colored markers for highlighting.

Connecting: This involves connecting information presented in the discussion with information from the textbook and other sources used in the class.

Abstracting: This involves presenting information and ideas both in diagrams and sketches. You can also use analogies (x is like y) and speculative, “what-if” questions.

The bottom line is to develop tools and techniques that allow you to comment upon, illustrate, question, review, and supplement your class notes. Once you get all these working with one another, your learning (and perhaps enjoyment) will improve.

Examine the sample dialogue notes below in order to see how space can be used to highlight, connect, and abstract information from various sources in the course. These notes are based on material that could be covered during the first couple of sessions in an astronomy class.

READING RESPONSES

Use the following three-step procedure --Preview>>Read and Mark>>Review-- to help you identify, remember, and apply key ideas from reading assignments.

Preview

Most students in an introductory science course are not accustomed to reading science. To make the material clear and manageable for you, textbook authors report information selectively in a clear sequence. In addition, they provide numerous illustrations and graphics that reinforce the most important information. Take advantage of both the structure and the graphics. Before you read a chapter, preview it. Look at the title and headings to determine the organization of the chapter. Look at the illustrations and read the captions to identify key concepts. Skim the text to look for vocabulary that is unfamiliar to you. Often these words will be in bold print or italics.

Once you have completed this quick overview, list key terms that are unfamiliar but appear regularly through the reading. Listing the key terms in advance makes you ready to pay attention when they are introduced and defined. In addition, phrase a question or pose a problem that you will want to have answered after reading. Since the main point of this course is model building, use this emphasis to help you frame a specific question. For example, in a chapter on the planets, you might ask, How does information about stellar objects confirm or challenge the cosmological model the class is developing? You will answer this preliminary question when you write your reading response.

With these terms and questions in mind, you will be able to distinguish major concepts from details used to illustrate the concept. Distinguishing between main concepts and details is important. While it may be interesting to know that Jupiter has 16 moons, it is more important to understand that Jupiter and its moons act much like a mini-solar system, with Jupiter serving as the Sun. It is important because what we learn about Jupiter and its moons can be applied to the whole solar system.

Read and Mark

When you read the material, be patient. The writer cannot present everything you need to know in one sentence or paragraph. Key material comes in a sequence. Thus, you must pay close attention, developing connections as you read along. Some material will make sense immediately. Other material will not make sense until later in the reading. Sometimes you will not make a connection until you receive more information in class. Sometimes you will need to ask your instructor for clarification.

As you read, mark the text so you can define new terms and answer your questions when you review. Devise a set of shorthand symbols you can use to identify and later locate these important materials.

Review

All the above does no good unless you invest the time after reading to review. Look over your marks and marginal notes in the text, write definitions for the terms you identified as important and try to answer the questions you asked.

The preview-read-review technique ends with the writing of the reading response. Assigned readings usually consist of a chapter or one or more sections from a chapter in your textbook. Complete a reading response for each assigned reading, as well as any additional readings you may do. Each written response should have the following three sections: summary, definitions, and application.

Summary: After you have followed the procedure described above, write a brief one-or two-paragraph summary of the reading. Note key concepts. Include details only if they help you remember the concepts. Put the whole reading assignment into a “nutshell.” This will help you determine what information is important and why. The summary should include the information needed to answer your previewing question or problem.

Definitions: Use your notes from the reading preview to construct a list of three to five key terms from the reading. Select terms that represent the most important information from the reading. Write definitions of these terms in your own words. These guidelines may help you write better definitions. First, underline the term and then identify it. Do not simply copy the definition from the book; use your own words. The instructor will rarely define a term in the textbook manner, but will opt for an operational definition. After identifying the term, write a sentence or two that explains its significance and demonstrates you know how to use the information contained in the term.

Application: Review your summary and your definitions. Then, consider how this new information fits into or causes you to change the model the class is constructing at the time. Write a sentence or two discussing the implications of the information in the model. Finally, incorporate this new information into your model.

COURSE SCRAPBOOK

Science is all around us. For example, how do we know about the interior structure stars? About other planets? About galaxies? How important is astronomy to scientists involved with the advising public leaders? To U.S. military intelligence? To American farmers? How does astronomy contribute to the pure sciences? How important are rocks and minerals to our everyday lives? What natural disasters related to the earth sciences affect us on a regular basis? Do earthquakes and volcanoes threaten us where we live? One way you may discover just how pervasive astronomy and/or earth science is in your everyday life is by keeping a Course Scrapbook.

Over the course of the semester you are asked to find, read, select, and clip or photocopying several types of articles about astronomy, geology, space exploration, and the universe in general. In some instances your instructor will provide you specific assignments. Typically, these assignments will give you a topic and suggest sources, such as newspapers, journals, and magazines, from which you are to choose an article. You should read articles about the sciences in the news whether they have been assigned or not.

You will then be expected to write a response to each article you read. Your scrapbook response should have the following sections.

(1) Identify the Source: Provide author’s name, title of article, title of periodical, date of publication, and page number(s).

(2) List the Key Facts, Arguments, and Points Made by the Author: Provide three or four facts that you think are important.

(3) Summarize the Article: Write a one- or two-paragraph summary of the article’s contents. Don’t try to cover every point, but focus, instead, on the overall gist or main point of the article.

(4) Evaluate the Article: In your evaluation, consider to what extent the article is newsworthy, significant, or of current interest. Also consider if the points made and the conclusions drawn in the article are valid. You will be expected to support your assessment of the article with facts and concepts you have acquired from the textbook, laboratory activities, and discussions in this course.

As you collect and write your Scrapbook responses, you should also note connections such as points of similarity or contradiction between the various Scrapbook articles. Your instructor will provide more information about how the scrapbook will be used in the course.