Development of Tiered Assignments Using Mentors in Environmental and Laboratory Based Courses

Abstract

The mastery of the competence of students in the Physics Education Study Program shows a fairly large variation. Students who excel and participate in collaborative research with lecturers generally complete their studies in four or less years. Most of the students in addition to their study period of more than four years, their mastery of competence as a teacher candidate (mastery of material, evaluation and learning methods, and research) is classified as lacking. Tiered assignments are lecture assignments given through strategic courses for six semesters, starting from semester II to semester VII (Tulandi, et al. 2015). The potential or benefits of multilevel assignments are very important to facilitate students' understanding in accepting subsequent courses. The objectives of this study are as follows: 1) Knowing the ability of student groups to identify and formulate specific phenomena from general phenomena, and to describe these special conditions. 2) Knowing the ability of the student group to associate the conceptually relevant facts or phenomena with the components of general phenomena. 3) Knowing the ability of student groups to analyze and determine conditions / phenomena that can be measured. This research is a descriptive analytic study, with the aim of identifying and formulating the abilities and development of students to analyze and formulate relationships of general and specific conditions that are measurable or to associate relevant and measurable physical phenomena, then formulate measurement and analysis procedures to produce conceptual formulations from facts / phenomenon. The research design used was the same subject design (Treatment by Subject Design). The subjects in this study were students of the physics education study program participating in the School Physics Study -1, Semester V students of classes A, B, and C for the 2019/2020 academic year. Based on the results of data analysis and discussion, it can be concluded that: 1) The process of student groups identifying and formulating specific phenomena from general phenomena and describing special conditions, at each meeting increases because student groups are able to identify and formulate specific phenomena from general phenomena. 2) The ability of student groups to associate conceptually relevant facts or phenomena with the components of general phenomena at each meeting increases, because student groups are able to associate phenomena with different events and have the same physical concept. 3) The ability of student groups to analyze and determine conditions / phenomena at each meeting increases, because student groups are able to analyze conditions / phenomena that can be carried out by direct measurement or association.

keywords: tiered tasks, phenomena, conceptualization