Essential Knowledge Student Reflections

Going with my theme this year of reflection and revision, I have had my students regularly reflect on the Essential Knowledge statements from the AP Biology framework. Last year, I organized the Essential Knowledge statements (along with the Enduring Understandings and Learning Objectives) by each unit and provided them to my students as study guides. I blogged about it last year here.

By the end of the year, I could tell that students weren't utilizing them as much as I had hoped. I want students to grapple with these statements, get familiar with the wording, and be able to connect what we are doing in class to these statements. First change: I made time in class for this reflecting to be done.

I also wanted students to have all of these reflections in one place to review them when they study for a test and to be able to look back as the year progresses to see their own growth from beginning to end. My goal was to automate as much of this process as possible. I already use a Google Form and Autocrat to grade labs and give students rich feedback in an easy-to-read document. I love the automation of this and blogged about it last school year here.

But the issue with reflections is that I want my students to have several reflections per unit. Each time they make a reflection with the Google Form, they create another row. So, I needed to be able to merge all of the separate rows of reflections from one student into one row. Enter an additional sheet Add-On called "Power Tools"! This add-on performs several functions, but the one I was interested in combines rows. I tell it what cell to look for identical entries (last name), and it merges all of the rows by one student into one row. This usually takes me two tries, because inevitably a couple of students will type an extra space after their names sometimes, but not all of the times. Power tools recognizes this space and doesn't consider the name identical.

I made a video of me making these documents for my students after they had done their reflections in Forms--just in case it makes more sense than the directions.

• Create response spreadsheet from the Google Form.
• In the newly formed spreadsheet, go to add-ons and get the add-on "Power Tools"
• Once it's added, go to the add-on menu, Power Tools, and click start.

• Select "Data" and then "Combine Rows."
• I then let it auto-select the data (which is all of it).
• Choose "last name" for the key column with duplicate records.
• For choosing columns to merge, I choose all of the columns, the action is "merge values," and the delimiter is "comma."
• Click "finish" and it merges the rows. 
• Then sort the sheet alphabetically by last name, which makes it easier for me to figure out who added that extra space after their last name.
• I remove the extra space and go through the combine rows process for a final time. (Which takes about 20 seconds.)
• Close power tools and launch the add-on "AutoCrat" so I can make a document for each student of their responses. 
• Give the job a name and click next.
• Select a template (I make these ahead of time and will give links to them.) It'll show what rows will be merged into which part of the google doc. Since I've put these together I know that everything will match up the way it needs to. This did take some tweaking at first for me.
• Chose how the documents will be named. I do <<First>> <<Last>> Unit # Reflections
• It'll suggest a folder to put the merged documents into. You may select a different one if you'd like.
• I skip the optional items and don't share the results by email, although if I had a lot of students I might.
• Save and then when the Job pops up, hit the triangle play button.
• Once all of the documents are merged, I go to the folder they were put in and print them out for my students to reference as they prepare for their upcoming unit test.

This sounds time consuming, and it did take me awhile to figure it all out. But now that I've done it several times, I can have it completed in about 10 minutes or less.

Here are the Google Forms and Templates for each unit.

Unit 1 Biochemistry                     Biochemistry Template
Unit 2 Cells                                  Cells Template
Unit 3 Cellular Energetics           Cellular Energetics Template
Unit 4 & 5 The Cell Cycle           The Cell Cycle Template
Unit 6 Molecular Genetics           Molecular Genetics Template
Unit 7 Evolution                           Evolution Template
Unit 8 Plants (this unit is so small, I skipped the reflections)
Unit 9 Ecology                              Ecology Template
Unit 10 Humans                            Human Form and Function Template