The scenario Jane is facing can be a challenging one with 6th graders. One of the problems that I could see Jane encountered was the problem about collaboration. The problem about collaboration with their group members can be a result of the maybe the students being too young to fully understand the dynamics of working as a member of team. Students need to be fully aware that their entries about their research paper affects the whole team. The responsibility should not just fall on just one team member. Collaboration is about everyone contributing to the assignment and taking responsibility for their contribution. Jane should be very clear with the students that she is able to monitor each student's individuals entries and speak to the group and clarifying misconceptions about assignment entries. Maybe the students who were not collaborating thought they were getting away with mooching off another classmate's commitment. On the other hand, group/team projects can be a personal challenge to that student who wants to really get a good grade on the research paper and does not want to rely on the other's partners lack of commitment and responsibility and would rather do the entire work of the team to ensure a good grade for him/herself. In this case Jane should acknowledge the work each member of team has brought to the paper and grade each student according to their input on the project.
Another problem that I could see Jane also encountered was about the team members respecting each others entries and contributions to the assignments. Jane needs to make the team members aware that the wikis is not about changing each others entries but adding to and enhancing each others contributions to the assignment. Maybe students can meet and discuss changes to the entries of other classmates and with agreement of the student who wrote the entry go back and edit the section that would need revision. That way emotions do not take the best of everyone involved and no one gets surprised or upset about changes done to their entries. I know that the whole purpose of the wikis is to work and edit at the comfort of each others home and schedule, but team/group projects do require a commitment to maybe meet face to face once in a while to agree on specifics about the assignment and its content. Being honest about each others additions or deletions should be done tactfully and with the highest regard to each other feelings. Here is like where students can find information about the etiquette when editing some one's entries. http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/26237/editing-others-posts-general-etiquette?noredirect=1&lq=1.
A third problem that I feel was obvious with Jane's assignment was the fact that students were embedding information directly from other websites with no significant informational value. Maybe Jane should of added a list of websites where students could find reliable information about the topic of hydrology. This way students were aware to concentrate their research on the websites specifically on the subject. The following website would of been a good source of information for students to start looking up about hydrology. Maybe a link like this one would set the team on the right path to their research paper: https://ce103.edublogs.org/project-ideas-and-resources/. Jane needs to make sure that students understand that they have to reference all the sources they are using in the research paper by adding a reference page at the end of the paper to acknowledge all the sources that they found and used information from. This link might be used by students to show them how to reference a source of information:
http://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2010/11/how-to-cite-something-you-found-on-a-website-in-apa-style.html. This might be a little too much for a 6th grader to understand the full implications on not giving credit to the information source but can give them an idea of not just to copy and paste items thinking no one would ever find out.
Jane has a good concept about using technology wikis in the science class, with just a few adjustments to her assignment, I'm sure her students would benefit tremendously from this type of science research.
Hello Bertha,
ReplyDeleteI think you are right about issues with collaboration. There is nothing more difficult in a classroom than to have students who do not know how to work together, but have to work on a group project. No matter how simple the task is, with collaboration skills the task will not be possible. I do think that 6th graders have already been exposed to plagiarism rules. I think they just needed a rubric or some rules that were supposed to have been provided by Jane. Thank you for your helpful links.
Lourdes