Posted by David Wetzel
Integrating the science process skills within your teaching does not require drastic changes. It simply involves making the process of science more explicit in lessons, investigations, and activities you are already using in your curriculum.
The science process skills are the methods used for helping our students understand how we know what we know about the world in which they live. This often means going beyond a science textbook and supplementing the core-content within textbooks. It also means using your course content as a means for exposing students to the real process of science.
In the book, Nature of Science: Part, Present, and Future (2007), Lederman indicates these methods involve making explicit references to the science process skills and allowing students time to reflect on how they participated in the process of investigating science phenomena.
Explicit Teaching
Shifting from an implicit strategy of student understanding to an explicit teaching strategy, helps ensure students understand the correlation between science processes involved in an investigation.
One example - During a lab investigation involving the graphing of a large amount of data students collected:
- First ask them to first draw conclusions on the meaning of their data before graphing it.
- Then have them draw further conclusions after graphing the data.
This process emphasizes the importance of visual representation during data analysis.
Real Data
Nothing can compare when students collect real data personally or use real data from remote networks such as satellites, buoys, or seismic sensors. Using real data in the classroom in any learning process supports student learning through support for:
- inquiry and participation in the scientific method.
- effective evaluation of data uncertainties and applicability.
- using quantitative and critical thinking skills.
- understanding about physical processes, data availability, data access, and data analysis and interpretation.
Problem Based Learning
Using discrepant events in problem based learning invokes critical thinking in students as they hypothesize reasons for what they just witnessed.
Discrepant events typically focus on one scientific concept at a time to control for variables and to avoid conflicting resolutions in students’ minds. These events are created by using:
- Student Interactions: hands-on minds-on investigation (greatest sensory involvement).
- Teacher Demonstrations: student observation (least student involvement).
- Videos: show a video of a scientific event for student observation (least sensory involvement).
Project Based Learning
Project based learning is a dynamic approach to teaching in which students explore real-world problems. Using this type of activity allows students the opportunity to use the science process skills to obtain a deeper knowledge of the science concept(s) they are investigating.
Scientific projects with depth, duration, and complexity challenge students and motivate them towards construction of new scientific knowledge.
These types of projects provide students with the opportunity to use both the basic and integrate science process skills as they collaborate with other students to design an experiment, observe, measure, predict, analyze and organize their data, and communicate their findings.
Tell Stories
Stories fall into two broad categories:
- Historical – which help students understand how scientific knowledge developed over time.
- Current – which help students understand scientific knowledge is a work in progress.
The use of stories results in greater student understanding through connection of science facts to hands-on science investigations. Stories also make the connection to “reasons for needing to know” science. Finally, it stimulates students’ minds to seek or produce explanations – i.e., curiosity.
The Value of these 5 Ways
We know students bring misconceptions to the science classroom and these misconceptions must be acknowledged before new, more accurate concepts can be learned.
Students need to appreciate and value science as a way of knowing. This process of science teaches our students how science works and then they are more likely to interpret a scientific story or debate with the ability to separate right from wrong.
Posted by David Wetzel
Project Based Learning in Science and Math
Project Based Learning is an instructional approach built upon authentic learning activities that engage student interest and motivation. These activities are designed to answer a question or solve a problem and generally reflect the types of learning and work people do in the everyday world outside the science or math classroom.
6 Steps to Creating a Project Based Learning Activity
The following steps are designed as a guide for creating a project based learning activity.
The order is flexible and designed to be rigid in nature to allow for individual methods and processes when develop a project.
Decide on the project’s focus or idea.
Two examples are:
- Create a design that proposes a solution for proposing a bike path in a community area and submit the proposal to a local planning agency. The proposal should include design, environmental impact, and estimated cost.
- Create a calendar to be sold to raise money for the 8th grade dance. Students determine on the cost of producing the calendar and how much the calendars should be sold for to make a profit. The profit will be used for the end of the year 8thgrade dance. Students must also create an advertising campaign to sell the calendars.
Develop a central driving question.
Two examples are:
- What is the shortest path for two students to take to meet each other when they are on opposite sides of the school?
- How much growth in population can the community’s water support?
Determine appropriate standards.
Aligned with appropriate national and district learning standards.
Determine how students will be assessed.
Project based learning assessments should include performance assessments or rubrics that measure each skill to be learned in the project. For example a rubric that assesses a student’s:
- Level of science or math content knowledge involved in the project
- How well specific math or science skills are required for the project are mastered
- How a student applied their knowledge gained from research and investigation
- Level of contribution to group effort, when specific tasks and jobs are assigned
Determine what products the students will create.
The following are some examples:
- Proposal – provided to the teacher describing the project’s investigation process
- Physical model – used to display the final result of solving the problem
- Poster – used to present the project’s processes or findings
- Sideshow - used to present the project’s processes or findings
- Video – used to present the project’s processes or findings
- Panel Discussion – hosted by a group or between groups to debate the pros and cons of a projects impact
- Multimedia Presentation – used to present the project’s processes or findings
- Journal – a record of the group’s or individual’s progress throughout the project
Decide what technology tools and web 2.0 tools will be used.
Some examples include:
- Slide Share – presentation of project’s processes and outcomes
- Glogster – interactive poster
- Wiki – used for display of final project and support group collaboration
- Flickr – used to collect photos for multimedia presentation or interactive poster
- Animoto – used to create a video of the project’s components for multimedia presentation or interactive poster
Following these six steps will make it much easier to create a project based learning activity for students, regardless of the students’ grade level or content being studied.
Sample Project Based Learning Ideas
Science Case Studies
Math Projects
Physical Science or Chemistry
Tennis Court Project
Posted by David Wetzel
Math Problem Based Learning
Project-based learning or Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is one of the best teaching strategies for engaging students in realistic learning activities. Students are not only interested, they are also learning math in the process.
Why?
Because their minds are engaged, critical thinking is taking place!
This is often referred to as critical thinking, minds-on, or inquiry-based teaching and learning.
PBL activities are designed to answer a real-world question or solve real-world problem. A good PBL problem provokes students to struggle with central concepts and principles in math.
These problems reflect the types of learning and work people do in the everyday world outside the classroom.
PBL is typically completed by groups of students working together to solve a problem, as they reflect upon their own ideas, prior knowledge and experiences, and communicate their recommendations based on findings.
Math Project Based Learning Activities
The following are examples of Problem Based Learning activities:
Repainting Tennis Courts
Students:
Determine the total cost of supplies.
The number of gallons of paint to cover all 8 courts if they apply two coats of green paint on each court, along with two coats of white paint on the lines of each court.
The cost of all the paint combined.
The grand total spent on paint and supplies.
Contextual information needed by students include:
Dimensions of a tennis court
Total number of lines, along with line dimensions on a tennis court.
How many square feet does a gallon of exterior paint cover.
Cost of a gallon of exterior paint.
Cost of a combo pack of roller frame, roller cover, and paint tray.
Cost of an appropriately sized paint brush.
Cost of any other materials they feel they need.
Additional Math PBL Activity Themes
Scavenger Hunt
Students:
Locate definitions of Tessellations on the Internet to compare with the real-world examples of tessellations (for example M. C. Escher’s work).
March Madness
Students:
Explore the many different areas of math found in the NCAA basketball tournament.
Use the NCAA bracket to determine which team or teams they want to follow in the tournament.
Find fractions, decimals, and percents; probability statistics; make predictions; and look for patterns within the basketball statistics of the team(s) they selected.
Make connections with and between the math contained within the NCAA tournament.
Explain the importance of mathematics in basketball.
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http://www.teachscienceandmath.com/2009/03/17/gifted-science-lessons-and-activities/
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