The students are devising their questions and this is where I start to get worried. How much help is too much help?
Some of the students have sat there like small birds waiting for me to feed them the question - however the mark scheme says that students have to move to a lower band if they needed a lot of help to develop heir question. If the students come up with their own topic and identified the areas they want to research, but can't hone the question to get something that lends itself to writing a dissertation, is giving them a question too much help?
This leads onto another question though - when is too little help acceptable? A friend's daughter is taking the EPQ at a 6th form college, talking to her over the weekend about the lessons she has had, the areas that have been covered (or not) in her lessons leads me on to ask when did 'independent learning' mean that students got virtually no help - she had not had a lesson on ethics, she didn't know what resources her College had in their library, she had never heard of Google Scholar, didn't know how to reference, didn't have a clue what integrating e-learning into the project meant and hadn't realised that picking an artefact still meant that she had to research her topic and write a something on the background to her topic. She thought that she could just write about the process of making her artefact. The students at her College seem to be left to do everything themselves so what is the right balance?
I have been following the scheme of work from the Edexcel exam board so think I have got the balance of lessons right but this leads me back to the question when is there too much help? We had a lesson on writing and developing your own questions but still some of them wanted me to write the question for them so what is the right balance?
Maybe I'm worrying needlessly and when I see the first draft of their dissertations that 6000 words of research and arguments will outweigh the small question of the title......
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