Mosart

I can definitely see myself using the Mosart assessments with my students in the future. They seem to be a great way to uncover misconceptions before starting science units. However, I may consider changing the format a little. The tutorial mentioned that the multiple choice questions helped teachers save time and were actually sufficient for understanding students' misconceptions, but I'm not convinced. I liked the format that Keeley used in her book of probes--multiple choice along with an explanation for why you chose your answer. I think this would help with the problem of students randomly choosing answers. I could even tell students that they should write "I guessed a random answer" as their reasoning if they have no understanding of the question at all. They could also explain their "ruling out" strategies in this explanation portion. If I don't include this, I think it would be a good idea to interview some of the students after they took the test to find out more information.

Overall, though, I think that these Mosart assessments would be very helpful for understanding the misconceptions of the entire class and also of individuals. There might be a misconception that basically every student has, and then I would know to address this with the entire class. However, one student could have a good understanding of some standards and have misconceptions in other standards, while another student is the exact opposite. Analyzing these tests would help me see how to differentiate my science classroom to address that problem. I'm not sure if it would be too chaotic, but perhaps different group experiments could be going on at once in order to address different students' misconceptions. The students could share their results to the entire class by a certain due date.

Another interesting point brought up by the tutorial was that misconceptions can actually be a sign of learning. Sometimes more advanced students are the ones who have the most complex personal theories. This is because they actually took time to consider how the world works. A student may have randomly chosen an answer in the pre-test, but if he specifically chooses a misconception answer in the post-test, this shows he has grown intellectually. For that reason, I will make sure to examine the pre-tests and post-tests carefully to look for those hidden improvements. I also like the idea of giving the pre-test again after the post-test to see if the learning has been retained, but I wasn't sure when this should happen. In my opinion, it may be best to do this towards the end of the school year but still allow enough time to reteach some concepts if necessary.