NUACHTÁN PREPA CELTA | April 2022

Prepa Celta’s IB Projects Conclusion

By Claudia Molleda | Prepa Celta’s Principal

Dear parents and students:

During this semester, the 10th and 12th grade students have focused on the work of the final products of their Personal, Reflective, Career-related Studies, Language and Literature and ITGS projects, it has been hard work and we are ready to send this month all these projects to moderation and evaluation before the IB.

I thank the teachers for the great effort they have made to carry out all the projects and the students for their continuous work for several months.

During April, we will dedicate ourselves to working on the CP External Evaluations, it will be the first time that students will have International Baccalaureate, we are excited, since it is one of the new challenges that will surely bring great success to all our students. who are about to complete the Programme.

We share relevant information about the work that is done at the College, particularly in High School, to train young people for a much more solid graduation that allows them to perform in any area of ​​knowledge and university at the one they go.

Congratulations to all of you!

Academic Honesty

María del Pilar Mones Urtuzuástegui colaboration | MS Academic Coordination

The International Baccalaureate (IB) understands academic probity as “the set of values and skills that promote personal integrity and good practice in teaching, learning and assessment”. And by misconduct, “any action (whether deliberate or unintentional) by an enrolled student by which he or she or another enrolled student is or may be unfairly advantaged in one or more components of assessment.” (Garza, 2014).

At Celtic School, for the development of academic probity, one of the attributes promoted by the IB community, Integrity, is worked on and strengthened. This attribute supports and reinforces integrity and honesty, i.e. “being of one piece”.

In all its programs, the IB  has an Academic Probity Policy that ensures to promote transparency and consistency of procedures in this regard, as well as regulate the actions and measures to be taken in case of misconduct, some examples of these are:

• Plagiarism

• Collusion

• Bringing unauthorized material to an exam

• Theft of examination materials

• Misconduct during an examination

• Disclosing or receiving confidential information about an examination within 24 hours following it

It is important to promote academic probity, because nowadays our teenagers do not know who owns the information they find on the Internet, they do not know about intellectual property, nor the importance of giving credit to the authors of ideas or works, it is of vital importance to recognize and respect this property without appropriating the work of others. It is essential that our young people recognize that it is a very serious offense, if they find this practice to be easy, later they will find it just as easy to violate other rules. I believe that it is transcendental to create awareness in our young people, that they recognize the seriousness of the fault and, above all, the opportunity they are losing to learn and develop research skills, we must continue to promote during their educational period the correct use of citations and bibliographic references.

“The principle of academic probity must be seen as something positive throughout the school community, become a natural part of academic studies and accompany IB students throughout their educational training and professional career.” (ibo.org. 2014). 

Guevara, E. MYP Academic probity brochure. Recovered on March 12, 2022 from https://es.scribd.com/document/379179896/Triptico-Probidad-Academica-Pai

Garza, C., (2014). Conferencia del IB en las Américas de 2014 [IB Americas Conference 2014]. Washington D. C. July 10 to 13.  Probidad académica: de los principios a la práctica. [Academic probity: from principles to practice.] [PowerPoint Slide]. Recovered on March 10, 2022 from https://www.ibo.org/contentassets/60d1e68eafc7437faf033f8d9f5c6d6d/saturday-probidad-academica-celina-garza.pdf

IBO (2014). La probidad académica en el contexto educativo del IB. [Academic probity in the IB educational context.] Recovered on March 10, 2022 from https://www.ibo.org/globalassets/digital-toolkit/brochures/academic-honesty-ib-es.pdf

IBO (2014). El Programa de los Años Intermedios: de los principios a la práctica. [The Middle Years Program: from principles to practice. ] Recovered on March 11, 2022 from https://www.spps.org/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinstanceid=38372&dataid=21224&FileName=from_principles_to_practice_en_espan_ol_2014.pdf

Unknown (December 15, 2017). Probidad Académica [Academic probity]. Blogspot. Recovere don March 11, 2022 from http://probidadnicolasito14.blogspot.com/2017/12/porque-es-importante-promover-la.html

Service-Learning as a source of reflection in digital media

By Juan Carlos Cruz Aguilar | Academic Coordinator

Service Learning [SA] takes seriously the importance of life outside of school, providing a counterweight to the academic life that some students may feel in a demanding school program; with the Service Learning experience you can have an ethical and punctual impact on society. For previous reasons, we want you to know one more experience of the IB yields in our school.

We share the process and reflection of the student Santiago Juarez Adame (2022) who decides to venture into communication and reflection skills from social networks:

I will carry out this project with the purpose of raising awareness about social problems that lack exposure in the media or that we do not give them due importance. I will address problems of all kinds, they will be related to the environment, all types of discrimination, armed conflicts, political, economic, and social crises. I will focus mainly on educating my local community (friends, family), but being able to reach more people is also one of my goals…

…My achievements up to this point have been all the learning that I have gained and been able to share with my local community, like friends, family, or in some cases, outsiders. I have also managed to maintain a very organized feed [of the account] and with a specific aesthetic regarding each group of posts that I made; I am very proud of this since it took me a long time to plan and finally make all these posts with multiple images and brief descriptions of the different themes they represented. All the extensive research that I have done in multiple sources and the search, creation, and edition of images that I did to be able to represent all the information that I collected have served me well; I have used several of my qualities to be creative, inquiring, responsible, organized. empathic and especially thoughtful when writing all the information. Understanding and reflecting on the social problems that I have investigated has been the most important thing for me, since I personally believe that in order to make a real change I must truly be interested in the subject and understand it; Once I identified and analyzed the problem well, that’s when I was able to share the information, knowing that everything is true and that raising awareness about this problem can benefit the “community” or group that it affects… the whole experience has helped me to sensitize myself and realize more situations and their complexity.

These letters that are worth more than gold is what encourage us to continue through a teaching-learning process that only the IB can give us.

Statistical Thinking at Prepa Celta’s Career-related Programme

By Jhonny Rafael Pérez | Mathematics Teacher

The main purpose of the inclusion of Probability and Statistics subject in the training process of the Career-related  Programme is that students  learn a set of techniques and methods for collecting, organizing and processing data in the context of the investigation of an observed phenomenon. Students will acquire skills that will allow them to generate and analyze information through the statistical data processing.

Thus, teaching and learning of Statistics is developed with a process approach, whose input elements are the data, either generated by direct observation or measurement of a variable, or provided by an authorized source. These data are processed with statistical techniques and methods for ordering, organizing, and analyzing with the aim of converting that data into information as a resultant product.  This information will then become the basis for a decision or the argumentative conclusion.

And in a world whose atmosphere is rarified by uncertainty, which grows exponentially day by day, statistics as a science of data and information acquires a transcendental value, since uncertainty is inversely proportional to the information available. The more information, the less uncertainty that any director or manager will have to deal with in their day-to-day decision-making process. So, knowledge and mastery of statistics will give the student or any professional an added value.

A new virus has arrived on the planet to stay, and I am not talking about SARS-COV-2, but about a creature that travels virally all over the world on the highways of computer networks: fake news. In a society where particular views are taken as facts, making assertions without a factual basis seems to be a day norm, but the real facts lie hidden in the data. Only the statistical treatment of these will reveal the true facts, leading us to the knowledge of reality.

Prepa Celta’s students have a Statistics Learning Approach, designed to develop the skills needed to design data collection tools, such as formats, data collection sheets or questionnaires, as well as using a variety of techniques, such as direct observation, an interview, or a survey.   Once their variables of interest have been defined, according to the research topic, the students personally go to the relevant locations to find and capture the data they need.

The student manages to understand through his own experience that the statistical processing of data will convert into information, and this in turn, when passing through the sieve of argumentation and laws of reasoning, will become knowledge. This is the essence of the scientific method: it starts from observing a phenomenon that catches the researcher’s attention and leads him to ask himself a question, a question that will serve as a spearhead or guide for the research process. Then, he defines a set of variables that are related to the occurrence of the phenomenon he has observed and then goes out to investigate and collect data to discover the information that will eventually lead him to objectively know the facts.

For example, in a learning experience, students have defined some things they would like to know about their peers, such as musical, sporting, gastronomic, academic and entertainment preferences, for which they have created a table like the one shown in the picture. They then go out to get the data by direct consultation. Once they have processed the data they have collected, they will really know what the preferences of the students are. Now statements will be made based on real knowledge and not from opinions based on subjective beliefs.

Another learning experience led them to collect data on the height of their peers by taking the data directly from the measurement that they, in their role as researchers, made of the height of a representative sample of the student population. Applying their knowledge and skills of statistical thinking, they reveal a fact: the average height of Prepa Celta’s students is 1.70 m. This is a fact, not an opinion.

With deep satisfaction, from my teaching experience, i can conclude that the students have achieved the following learning:

• Knowledge of Statistics is the reliable basis of the decision-making process. Any decision not based on facts will result in a conviction handed down by the examining magistrate, based on the laws of statistical thought.
• Any conclusion or statement not based on statistical findings is speculation, which makes its spokespersons irresponsible.