When the school year began, I had no notification of which students in my classes had individual educational programs. I was startled in the third week to receive a list that contained Maxwell Butterfield's name in the honors class as he was my top achieving student and did not seem to have any disabilities. Maxwell is the type of student who is always engaged and asking intelligent and challenging questions. On weeklong homework assignments, he begins the problems right away and is able to pace himself so that he has enough time to get help if he needs it. Liked and respected by his peers and especially competent in calculation-based physics problems, Maxwell is willing and able to help his classmates on homework. He is mature enough to walk them through the problems without just giving them the answer.

Maxwell's only struggle I initially discerned was with lab reports. I require that the students record their labs in a notebook. The skills needed to complete these assignments include the ability to organize information as it is gathered, to write clear and concise sentences, and to draw conclusions from results. While Maxwell had no trouble conducting the experiment and drawing conclusions, he had some difficulty expressing his ideas in an organized, clear way. Here are two examples of procedures from a lab done in early October. The first passage is Maxwell Butterfield's work and the following procedure was written by an average performing student in the class. All errors are transcribed as they appeared in the lab notebook.

Maxwell Butterfield:
Bulldozer starts on one side of the papre (river). Three trails are done to calculate the velocity in a "still river" atmosphere. Then the bullbozer went across while a person pulled the paper creating by measuring the distance the river and the time it takes to get across. The "still river" velocity was then compared to the "flowing river" velocity. Find withs of papre find velocity of bulldozer.

Average Performing Student:
The bulldozer's velocity was determined by using a meter stick and timing the bulldozer. The bulldozer was used to do the experiment. The width of the paper was measured. Three trials were done to compare the acutall time vs. the predicted time. Three more trials were done by having one lab partner pulling the paper, acting like the flowing river. The velocity of this was calculated and a resultant vector quantity was found by using these values.

Neither student has a perfect paragraph. I was amused by Maxwell's creativity in his choice of "atmosphere" to describe the scene, a somewhat literary twist. Additionally, he had a few more mistakes in spelling than the average student. Where the major difference lies, however, is in Maxwell's ability to organize his thoughts. At the end of this writing sample, it seems that he got frustrated and started writing random fragments down in the notebook without taking the time to think about topic sentences and supporting ideas. The sample also demonstrates the proctor's observation that Maxwell struggles with holding information in the short-term memory while performing an operation with it. He cannot think about writing the procedure while doing the procedure.

Maxwell is probably aware of his inability to keep ideas in his short-term memory and organize them before writing them down as he always avoids being the one who is the recorder during cooperative learning activities. Additionally, he takes few notes during class. He sits at his seat attentive and engaged. He has learned to make his own modifications by determining what has worked for him in the past. However, since he also has a desire to go to college, he must develop some writing strategies to help him improve his communication, both informally in lab reports and formally in compositions.
 
 

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