Thing Six

Thing Six - Teacher Guide to the Research Project Calculator

I have always enjoyed teaching research, though I feel as if I have not done a very good job of it in the past. I didn't know how to encourage reliable resources and only had myself to rely on when checking for plagairism. I also expected either too much or too little from my students. A tool like the RPC is going to help me immensely.

First, I feel as if I can throw more rigorous material and demands at the students as the timeline portion of the assignment will not be their responsibility anymore. They will know when things are due and get actual warnings sent to them to that end. I have found that there are several students that would gladly do the work, but are so disorganized that they literally forget about it. For this reason, I am willing to bet that this tool alone will increase the completion rate from my students by 10 - 20%.

Second, It makes my job much easier. Rather than having to remember to remind students daily of what their progress should be and when things are due, I can instead do that only rarely and be able to focus more on the daily lessons.

Third, having this structure in place gives students something concrete to consult if I am not available for soem reason (i.e. them working from home over a weekend).

A challenge, though a surmountable one, is going to be to figure out all the ways to customize the RPC to get it to do exactly what I want. I am also going to have to restructure my units a bit since it looks like the research portion is going to be spread out to give students enough time to hit signposts along their way toward finishing their projects. While I don't have a problem at all working two units at the same time, in fact I like to be able to change things up on occassion, it will take some effort to do so.