Data Analysis

The lesson used for analysis addressed Colorado State Science Standards:
Standard 2, Concept 1: Matter tends to be cycled within an ecosystem,
while energy is transformed and eventually exits an ecosystem.
Standard 2, Concept 2: The size and persistence of populations depend
on their interactions with each other and on the abiotic factors in an
ecosystem.
The learning target for the lesson are students will be able to create and
describe a food web. This can be any food web as long as they are able to
show the transfer of energy is complicated and dynamic in an ecosystem.
To begin the lesson students were shown a picture of an ecosystem
and describe the system using scientific vocabulary and their prior
knowledge. This pre-assessment was used to show how much students could
recall information about food webs and ecosystems. The majority of students
were able to recall that organisms rely on one another for energy. This
allowed the lesson showing energy transfer to build onto their prior
knowledge.
The class participated in an activity to show the transfer of energy
from producers to varying levels of consumers using candy as a visual
representation of energy being passed between different organisms in an
ecosystem. All students participated and engaged in transferring candy from
plants to insects to frogs etc. Following the activity students completed
a worksheet reinforcing the concepts of food webs and energy transfer. The
worksheet had students create a food web with several organisms
diagraming how complicated they can get as other organisms are introduced.
To assess how well students achieved the objectives, a postassessment was given asking students to create their own food web
diagraming the exchange of energy. Below is a table depicting the degree to
which students accomplished the lesson objectives.
High
(Objectives Met)
Students created a food
web showing energy
transfer between multiple
food chains.
Garrett
Emily
Ryan
Jenna
Angel
Josh
Jaden
Abby
Tristan
Ben

Expected
(Objectives Partially Met)
Students were able to
show energy transfer
between chains but did
not include multiple food
webs.
Chloe
Elaina
Regan
Halle
Tessa

Low
(Objectives Not Met)
Students created food
chains, but did not show
connections between
chains to make a web.
Kylie
Nicole
Liv
Luke
Oswin

Mateo

Degree Students Met Objectives

12
10
8
Highly 6
# of Students

Expected

Low

4
2
0

Degree to which Students met objectives

This shows 52% of students are highly met the objectives, while 24% of
students met the expected objectives, and 24% did not quite meet the objectives.
This means that 76% of students met or exceeded the objectives. I think this is a
reasonable amount of success for a single class period lesson.
The students with the highest level of understanding drew a very complicated
food web, showing many organisms eating plants, and in turn being eaten by many
other organisms. Several students not only showed each level they were able to
label each level in the food web. This exceeded the objective for this lesson, but is
something all students would be required to know by the end of this unit.
The expected group of students drew food webs showing multiple food
chains, but did not connect the food chains to create multiple webs. It was clear the
understood what food web was and how the energy transfers through the web, but
in their diagram they did not accurately depict the complexity I was hoping for.
One sub-group that I was monitoring were two boys who typically do not work
together effectively (they typically joke around rather than complete their work)
both highly met the objective. They seemed off-track while working on the
worksheet in class, but both completed the post-assessment showing a high degree
of understanding the content. I found this surprising, but learned that students who
are often off-task can still receive information.
The second sub-group I was concerned about were two different boys who
expressed extreme displeasure with their new seating chart that morning. One
student was very unhappy to be sitting next to another student. The two boys were
told the seating arrangements were not permanent but they needed to moved
passed their problems and sit next to each other for the time being. Overall, they
seemed to mostly ignore one another and one student reached the high category
for completing the objective. The other student was in the low category of not
meeting the objective. I believe this may have been due to misunderstanding the
post-assessment and not misunderstanding the objective of the lesson itself. I will
address this more below.

The lowest level of students failed to meet the objective, but I believe this
was due to unclear directions. These students created food chains that showed the
transfer of energy. Some of the students in the low category are very high achieving
students, so I do not believe this was a lack of understanding the information
presented in the lesson, but more so a confusion about the directions of the postassessment.
Some changes I would make would be to provide clear directions regarding
the student objectives. I think my post-assessment was too vague to accurately
gauge the students understanding of the lesson. It is possible that many of the high
achieving students in the low category understand the lesson information. Many of
the lower level students were in the high category of understanding, and I do not
believe they would score well on the lesson while high achieving students would
not. Overall, the objective was well met and students were highly participatory.