What is the right amount of help to give?

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......

EPQ planning

The students have returned to the course, handed in their mini project, had their feedback and are now in the throes of completing their project propsal forms.

The mini projects were useful in giving an indication into the way they work, the different approaches they took to planning and reflecting on their progress to date.

We have now started the planning stage and last week the students looked their objectives:

What skills do they want learn?
Why do they want to study the subject?
What do they want to gain from the whole process?

They also have to reflect on the reasons for their choice of subject, their future plans and how their EPQ will fit into this. In approximately nine months time they will be looking back on their reasons, the objectives, their timescales, the resources they used and taking stock of their EPQs and reflecting on what they have learnt and gained from the whole process. Evaluation is key to a successful project but is often forgotten in the relief of completing the task.

One of the things I learnt from last year, and I am going to implement this year, is to ask the students to produce a mini literature review of 3 sources to ensure that they can find and evaluate good sources.  An excellent tool for evaluating resources which I will be encouraging the students to use is the Information Source Evaluation Matrix (ISEM) http://www.library.dmu.ac.uk/Images/Selfstudy/ISEMLeaflet.pdf

I also learnt from bitter experience not to sign off off any PPFs until the students have made a cast iron choice and have no intention of changing their direction half way through the project!

The next stage is time management and GANTT charts.

Extended Project Qualification Level 3

For the last year I have been the EPQ Coordinator for 3 students studying for their AS. The EPQ, for those who don't know, is a qualification whose main purpose is to help students develop independent learning skills and study a subject that they enjoy or want to pursue in real depth.

The students develop time managements skills, research skills, the ability to synthesise and analyse the information they find, and reflect on the what they have learnt, where they have gone wrong and what they would do differently.

My students all did the dissertation. They all want to go to university and felt that this would be a good opportunity to develop the skills they would need there.

As much as it has been a learning curve for them - it has also been one for me.

For the first time I was solely responsible for ensuring that they were learning the skills necessary to complete the EPQ to the best of their abilities. I was the one advising, supporting, encouraging and now marking their work for submission to the exam board.

I had been involved in the EPQ in a previous post but only to deliver the research element to all the students. I never actually saw the end product. Seeing everything from start to finish has been an eye-opener and a worry! I must have done something right though because I have just started the whole process again with a new cohort and the number has doubled to 6!

We have started with the research element as that is the one I feel most comfortable with. We have looked at e-resources, catalogues, subject gateways (what happened to Pinakes! Hear hair being torn out during lesson when realisation that the site that was there a month ago had gone!), and a multitude of other resources. Each students has a mini-project to do by the end of term, of a 1000 words on various subjects of my choice.

I have decided to use my blog as an attempt to reflect on the EPQ - from my side. The students have to keep a log - so should I. Watch this space as I try to convey the horrors that is an ethics lesson, develop thinking skills, teach the finer points of literature reviews and much more. I would be grateful for any feedback or support that may be out there.