They are much, much more useful this way.
For example, the other day I asked my students if they had any questions about their labs or about their blog posts they had to write. I read their questions as they came in, grouped them into categories I scribbled quickly on a post-it, and then immediately got their questions answered--either by me or by someone else. Their questions provided me instant feedback on their blogs and labs, and I managed to ease some of their anxieties about both by getting their questions answered.
While that's pretty darn useful, I'd say what my colleague and I concocted this morning was even more useful. You see, our students in our Physical Science classes had set up their very first self-designed labs yesterday. During the set-up, I walked around the room, telling my students I was there for safety purposes only--I was not answering questions about how to do their lab. Instead, I looked at what errors they were making in their setup, and took pictures of their various lab designs about what factors influenced how objects move. Today, using one of those pictures, my colleague and I designed this question as their class opener:
Check out the photo below of someone's lab setup from yesterday:
b) Identify the control group and the experimental groups in this experiment.
c) Identify the independent and dependent variables in this experiment.
d) What science concepts would help this student explain the data that will be gathered?
These questions were a great review of two of our previous objectives about the vocabulary surrounding the science process--and now they were looking at them in the context of the lab they just did. But I was a bit of a total jerkface with this question, I must admit. That's because this picture shows a lab with two variables (differences), not one, and I wanted to see if they could figure that out. (In case you're wondering, the two variables are the mass difference between the carts and the surface the carts are rolling on.) If they recognized the two variables, they should have experienced some sort of cognitive dissonance about the answers to letters a, b, and c above. Last year, I would have read their responses long after class had ended, reviewing the question for the class without knowing where their learning was at. But this year, because I read their responses as they came in, I saw that they were doing one of two things:
a) Seeing that there were, indeed two variables, but not realizing this was a problem
b) Ignoring one of the variables completely.
As a direct result of this new information about my students' learning, I started copying and pasting student answers (good and bad) into a Google Doc which I displayed on my overhead screen. I then asked students to analyze the differences between the answers. It was through those discussions and through a group discussion that my classes had a collective "OHHHHHHHH!" moment regarding basic experimental design. Understanding is a beautiful thing. Especially when students realize that they need to change a lot about their own lab procedures, causing them to pull up their pre-lab forms in Google Docs ALL ON THEIR OWN and fix and change and learn from failure.
But it was the last question that really floored me when I read my students' answers. By "science concepts" I was thinking more along the lines of ideas such as friction, motion, forces, acceleration, gravity, velocity, and the like. What I got instead were data analysis, making spreadsheets, measuring distance, and graphing the data.
Whoa. Holy that's not at all what I expected, Batman.
You can probably guess that we took a good long look at that last question. But we didn't go over what the words meant, because me giving them my words to memorize isn't how school is done in room 2203. Instead, we determined together that what my students mentioned were lab skills--not science concepts needed to explain their data. We then generated a list of concepts as a class, and then student teams generated a know/need to know list that contained what they already knew about the science concepts and questions about what they still needed to know about the concepts. Tonight (hopefully!) they are researching their little hearts out, coming with their questions answered and ready to be organized into an I-chart so they can do a proper data analysis--one that makes connections between the science and the data, not listing the science and their data separately, with no neurons strained the least little bit to try and make meaning of their data.
But if I hadn't been keeping an eye on their responses, I wouldn't have caught this confusion between lab skills and science concepts until much later--when it was probably much harder to repair.
So I'd say reading my openers during class is not only more useful, but much more meaningful. It's meaningful to me so I can adjust my instruction, and, more importantly, vital to my students so they can adjust their learning. Below is something I heard as I went a-wandering amongst them today, listening to them generate their own questions:
"Last year they just told us what these science words were. Now we're actually learning them."