MOTIVATING AND CONTEXTUALIZING THE INQUIRY
Inquiry. Each unit will be structured around investigations that require students to apply the concepts and strategies to investigate a rich set of data. Students ask questions, plan experiments, and collect, analyze and share data and information. The investigations will also allow students to experience scientific phenomena and processes, and to examine new information.
Driving Questions. The context for the inquiry is created through the use of driving questions, based on real world experience. A driving question is rich, open-ended, and connects with authentic interests and curiosities students have about the world. The target science ideas and skills are instrumental to understanding and answering the driving question. We will talk with teachers, students, and parents to develop driving questions that can engage students.
We have candidates for driving questions based on the general area of the target learning objectives and our prior curriculum work, but design of the specific driving questions will rely on the particular learning objectives about matter and evolution on which we focus. For instance, in the structure of matter unit, the driving question might be "What poisons exist in my home?" or we might retain the driving question "What is the quality of air in my community?" A driving question of understanding an ecosystem in crisis or evaluating recovery plans to save an endangered species might form the driving question for the diversity of life and evolution unit. As the materials are field tested, we will modify the driving question to reframe it into a question about which students care. We have used this technique to identify driving questions that can sustain student involvement.
Real World Phenomenological Experience. We use anchoring events to help students apply their emerging scientific understandings to the real world, thus helping them see value in their academic work. An anchoring event might engage students in observations of their environment. For instance, in an air quality project, students might take a community walk and make initial observations of possible sources and effects of pollution. An anchoring event might also be an investigation. Students in the evolution unit might explore organisms in their local ecosystem and consider how each organism is adapted to that environment.
Connecting to Community Problems and Issues. Once driving questions are developed, we use a number of strategies (see Designing for Diversity) to connect the driving questions posed by students to specific problems or issues that exist in their communities. We work with parents and community members to generate resources that can be used to carry out investigations and to apply scientific concepts learned via the curricula to the actual problems of the community.
Literacy Links. We will attend to scientific literacy issues such as highlighting how scientific language, discourses, and writing genres differ from the technical language, discourses, and genres of other content areas. We will work toward these literacy links both within the science classrooms and outside of science classrooms by making links to language arts classrooms, wherein teachers will engage students in the production of texts related to the scientific concepts and community problems that they are studying. In both classes, we will provide multiple opportunities for students to predict, observe, and explain their ideas about scientific phenomena in oral and written discourse, and we will engage them in discussions of primary source readings (e.g., news reports, scientific reports, web pages) related to the concepts under study.