Reflection on "Where In the World...?" Project

After rereading my last couple posts, I again was reminded of the strengths of this project and the good things that the students brought to it.  However, upon reflecting on the grading of the projects (which happened on Friday), I'm not quite as positive.

On Wednesday, I was ecstatic over student's use of the rubrics.  I actually witnessed them checking their project against the items needing to be included.  On Friday, I was rubbing my head in frustration as their scores on the project took a nose dive because items were left out of the project.  To be fair, it wasn't all students.  There were students that did an excellent job!  I even had one 100% out of the bunch!  But, enough students did not check their project against the rubric, to make me wonder why I even write one.  Why is it that the negative parts of the project seem always larger than the positive aspects?

My nature is to always look at what I did positively with my teaching and what I could have done better.  If my students don't perform at the level of where I was expecting, what else could I have done to help them be more successful?

Positives of student learning - see previous post as I don't want to be redundant.

Holes in students understanding
1.  Connecting the theorem to the career.  Students would find an example and simply, copy and paste the image into their career.  They did not describe in their own words about how the image fit with using the theorem in the career.
2.  Students did not create two sketches of what two problems might look like for their career.
3.  Students did not include the education needed and salary range of the career.

What I did to help scaffold the project for student success
1.  All students got a copy of the "lesson plan" to refer to
2.  The lesson plan was gone over as a whole class the first day
3.  Each day's task(s) were outlined on the lesson plan
4.  Each day's task(s) were reviewed at the beginning of class
5.  I modeled thinking and some of the processes I used as I researched careers, giving particular attention to those careers that did not state specifically how the the theorem was used.
6.  I taught a mini lesson on web evaluation tools.
7.  Students got a copy of the rubric used to grade the projects.
8.  I supplied students with a simple checklist to make sure they included all items on the back of the rubric.
9.  I mentioned the rubric every day we worked on the project.
10.  I included helpful websites on the lesson plan, including one website that listed sites of careers that used Pythagorean's theorem and a .gov website to learn more about their career...including the education and salary items.

What I need to do to improve the project
1.  I should have created an example of a final product to show the students.  This would also have given me an idea to the pitfalls the students may have encountered.
2.  Did I provide too much support?  Should I have just let the students go?

One positive from this project that I did notice that differed from last year when I didn't do the career portion...on a worksheet where students must solve real life application problems, students were able to solve on their own with far fewer questions than in previous years.  I think the application skills that they gained from their research helped them solve various real life applications of the Pythagorean's Theorem.  Maybe we are moving in the right direction.