A little context.
I designed this task for my 10x5 students. They find science and maths difficult and all are the most forgetful students I have ever taught. They are robust and willing and richly deserve some success. Every calculation I have done with them , has been very difficult and the prospect of having to perform a three part calculation on something as abstract as specific heat capacity was a little daunting. However, this worked, and one student even could rearrange the formula to calculate mass, specific heat capacity and temperature change.
Why I think it worked.
This for me is a clear success of the bar model, which provide a student friendly (and owned) scaffold for this calcualtion.
Ben Rogers excellent blog posts really helped.
Other features that supported the students in their learning was:
1. Managing the complexity of the task.
2. Increasing the number of operations the students had to do to complete each calculation.
3. Practice.
4. The use of examples.
5. Removal of scaffolding.
I have tried to annotate a students worksheet to show where these features apply.
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