Modern science is not just the arcane province of a few lucky and gifted people.
It is the way of thinking and learning that brought us out of the Dark Ages.
—Our reflective observer The National Research Council (2012), whose members are drawn from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine, generated a major report on which curriculum reform in science education can be drawn. The report makes clear that the new science standards should apply to all students, not just some. When compared with pre‑
vious curriculum guides and most documents on standards, a major addition to the science curriculum is the inclusion of engineering and technology along with physical sciences, life sciences, earth and space sciences, and the applications of science. All students should have an understanding of the basic concepts of these disciplines and how knowledge is created— the methods of inquiry they employ.
All students should learn how these concepts can be applied in their lives and environments and to developments in the global society.
C h a p t e r F o u r
Organizing idea
The science curriculum is unified by continuous hands‑on experience. All students, K– 12, should conduct investigations in the sciences and participate in projects where the methods and concepts of the sciences are employed.
The National Research Council (NRC) states firmly that science education should focus on only a few important concepts from each discipline at any given
grade level— and the learning process should be built around in‑depth inquiries into topics selected because they contain those concepts. This recommendation is in stark contrast to courses that attempt to touch superficially on a mass of topics— the kilometer‑ wide but millimeter‑ deep approach. For example, consider the almost desperately shallow coverage in many of the commercially available textbooks; or, for that matter, the outlines of the “advanced placement” courses.
The framework for K–12 science from the NRC also emphasizes “cross‑
cutting” concepts— ones that are common to the disciplines and should be learned both to better understand the disciplines and because they have great organizing power. This leads to a more unifying understanding of science as well as helps the learning process as ideas learned in one area are rediscovered in another subject.
The framework is also unified by continuous hands‑on experience. All stu‑
dents, K– 12, should conduct investigations in the sciences and participate in proj‑
ects where the methods and concepts of the sciences are employed. Experiential learning provides the concrete ground for understanding more complex and abstract principles as they are encountered, as well as application to other aspects of life. The investigative frame of reference is to be a lifelong outcome.
All students means everyone, not just those who are college‑ bound or aim‑
ing toward careers in scientific or science‑ related fields. However, knowing the core concepts and methods of inquiry and how to apply them to understand their immediate and distant environment is the foundation for those who will pursue such careers.
The three dimensions of the NRC framework (2012) and the Next Genera‑
tion Science Standards (NGSS Lead States, 2013) will come to life through models of teaching that include the cooperative/ inductive inquiry processes in Chapters 1 and 3 and the investigative methods developed in the formal disci‑
plines. In this chapter, we give extensive attention to the curricular/ instructional models developed by the Biological Sciences Study Committee educators over the last 50 years. However, the framework from the NRC cited previously is an excellent guide to content and processes of the major areas of scientific study.
This chapter celebrates science as a teaching strategy. We will deal with the general model and illustrate it with several scenarios and then with a more expansive example from biology. Let’s begin in a classroom.
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c e n a r I o GInny’s prImary students ask, “what’s GrowInGIn our neIGhBorhood?”
Imagine Ginny Townsend’s second- grade students as they embark on a study of the vegetation in the neighborhood of their school. The inquiry stemmed from a discussion in which they realized that they had little knowledge of the growing
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things they pass every day. They had names for only a small proportion of the flora they live with and only superficial knowledge about how the vegetation they see every day gets nourishment, grows, and reproduces. Ginny knows that they begin with very little content knowledge, but they have experienced plant life all their lives and have more information than they realize.
resources
Ginny’s courses are hybrids, where campus and distance experience are inter-twined. The campus dimension leads the students to work together and provides them with learning strategies; in this case they will be learning a cooperative/
inductive strategy, beginning by collecting data from the living plant life in their neighborhood.
Digital resources provide vastly more information than any human teacher could expect to have. For example, http:// knowplants.org is a gateway to dozens of databases that the students can use; quite a few are designed for kids and many were created specifically to support science education. Print sources— books, encyclopedias, and other references— will also be very important. Ginny's class is equipped with a print library of relevant books, computers, email, digital cameras, and camcorders. She has developed a class webpage on which she and they can post ideas and information; it contains a link to http:// knowplants.org. As for devices, many of the students are more familiar with tablets and smart phones than with laptops, and most have not used word- processing programs often or made multimedia reports.
So she knows that she will be leading them into relatively unfamiliar con-tent and will have to help them learn to collect and classify information from print and digital sources (and from local experts). They will need to learn to develop and test ideas, and generate attractive and accurate reports about the results of their inquiries, building general computer skills and web skills as the inquiry proceeds.
Initial process
Ginny begins by leading the students to collect information by observing the veg-etation around them the first week in September. Therefore, the inquiry opens with walks around the neighborhood, taking pictures of the specimens as a whole and close-up pictures of their leaves. The pictures are printed and pinned up on a wall so they can be studied. Smaller copies form the beginning of notebooks, with 8" * 10" copies for each student.
Ginny asks the students to look at the leaves and classify them. They use the interactive whiteboard to display and explain their categories, moving the pictures around and talking about them. The photographs are loaded into the folder for
this unit so that it is easy for the teacher and students to move them around. Some of the categories are “leaves that look like hands in gloves,” “leaves come in sets along the sides of twigs,” and “oval leaves.” The students agree on those catego-ries and reorganize the pictures to display them.
Next they examine the pictures of the plants, bushes, and trees and classify them, using the general categories and the attributes of the leaves to build more categories, again moving the pictures around on the whiteboard. Gradually they work out a terminology for the categories that most can agree on— tall trees with glove- like leaves, tall trees with oval leaves, and such— and reorganize the pictures to reflect the new categories. Their observation will become more detailed and refined as, for example, they begin to notice the veins in leaves.
Ginny then displays http:// knowplants.org on the interactive whiteboard and leads the students to study the lists of databases and select ones that might pro-vide descriptive information about vegetation in their area.
They begin with the Maryland Native Plant Society (www.mdflora.org), a site operated by volunteers. On the featured page “The Year of the Oak,” they obtain the names and pictures of oaks that are indigenous to Maryland. They download a picture of a black oak that is bare of most of its leaves. The children look at their pictures, taken when the trees had leaves, but think they have identified a black oak in the group they photographed during their walk. The next task is to see whether they can find a picture of the black oak tree with leaves and, if possible, a close-up picture of its leaves. The Better Homes and Gardens Plant Encyclopedia (www.bhg.com/ gardening/ plant- dictionary) contains a picture with all the leaves, and it does look like theirs. The United States Department of Agriculture Plants Database (http:// plants.usda.gov) provides a picture of the leaves, which also closely matches their picture. The children enlarge the USDA picture and compare it with a leaf they clip off their tree. They conclude that they are 90 percent sure they have a black oak identified and proceed to read about how it reproduces, where it grows, and so on.
The inquiry proceeds, tree by tree, bush by bush, and flower by flower. Teams are organized to search specific bases and particular species. Categories are rede-veloped and named, such as “bushes that have flowers.” Working in pairs, the students build PowerPoint presentations of categories they have generated, describing the items in the categories. They create a “virtual plant walk” and share it with other classes and their parents.
Some students suggest that they label many of the things they have studied in their neighborhood with their colloquial and scientific names. Ginny leads them to the town council for approval. Their next discussion is over how much informa-tion to include on the labels; just the names don’t seem enough.
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In this scenario, collecting information about the domain (local vegeta‑
tion) being explored and categorizing members of the category (trees, bushes, and so on) drives the unit. Digital pictures and displays play their part and the web‑ based data source brings information from specialists to the study. Finally, citizenship found its way into the process.
| R eflecting
Building concepts enables us to manage information, retain it, and use it.
There is a high probability that it is the foundation for the 21st‑ century skills—
and, generally, for most higher‑ order thinking skills and most types of intelli‑
gence (see Joyce & Calhoun, 2010, 2012).
A complication is that a high level of competence in reading is required to access many of the riches available in the digital world. Ginny’s students are able to explore the digital databases because of the scaffolds she provides— and the students support one another also. (See Chapter 6 in Joyce & Calhoun, 2010, and Joyce, Calhoun, Jutras, & Newlove, 2006).
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c e n a r I o GenetICs Comes to FIFth Grade25 June, 2002. John Orr’s fifth- grade class has been browsing the Science Times section of the New York Times and comes across an extensive report on the genome mapping project in Iceland (Wade, 2002). John’s school has a subscription to the electronic edition of the newspaper, and it is well used in his class. He leads the students toward stories that relate to parts of the world they have been study-ing or items of national and international news he believes they should be conver-sant with. Working in teams, they also browse sections of the paper, looking for items of interest. Often, as today, John projects an article on the screen, using an LCD monitor on the overhead projector, and reads the article with the class.
Information is recorded on newsprint tablets and the major points in the article are summarized by the student “writing leaders of the day.”
In this case, he asks the leaders to find a file where information from past for-ays into genome projects are summarized. He projects those summaries on the whiteboard before turning to the June 25 article. The students have been fasci-nated with the genome projects. They are amazed to find that 99.9 percent of human genomes are shared by everyone on the planet. The web has been a fine resource, as have been the encyclopedias in the classroom CD-ROM collection, as John has led the class to study the concepts of race and gender. They have begun to realize how many differences are products of socialization.
Today’s story interests the students for three reasons:
1. In Iceland, the researchers have genealogical information that goes back for 1,100 years, with a population that has had little immigration over that period of time. Thus, the research strategy differs from the other genomic projects.
2. The project is disease oriented and, in the case of asthma, the researchers have traced current asthmatics who are under treatment to a single common ancestor who was born in 1710.
3. In the 800s a.d. about 10,000 to 15,000 Norsemen founded Iceland. They raided Northern Ireland and England for young women, whom they captured and made into “slave wives.” Altogether they enslaved 40,000 to 50,000 young females.
This third fact galvanizes the students. They have trouble coming to grips with it, and they become oriented toward the study of Iceland and Scandinavia. They set out to gather data using encyclopedias and databanks on nations. They also come to realize that the “ wife- raids” by the Vikings greatly depleted the female population in Northern Ireland and Northern England and wonder what effect that might have had. Eventually, they will be in touch with a scholar at Oxford who will offer his opinions about the subject.
The students are studying how science is made as well as its findings. John keeps making them aware of the “how” as well as the “what.” He keeps reminding them of Carl Sagan’s quote that “The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.”
The subsequent history of the Iceland project has been difficult, largely because of privacy considerations. That history illustrates that science is a socio‑ cultural activity and does not take place in a vacuum. See Gillham (2011) for a fine analysis in http:// www.ftpress.com/ article.
You can well imagine that, today, John and his students would be building inquiries from the recent reports of the finding of an ancient skull (Skull 5) in the country of Georgia and generating questions about the implications of these early fossils (Wilford, 2013).
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c e n a r I o InvestIGatInG soundIn London, Ontario, Mr. Hendricks’s fourth- grade students enter their classroom after lunch to find an array of glasses, bottles, bells, wooden boxes of different sizes (with holes in them), tuning forks, xylophones, and small wooden flutes. These
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objects are spread about the room, and the students spend a few minutes playing with them, creating a most horrendous sound. Mr. Hendricks watches.
After a few minutes the students begin to settle down and one of them asks,
“What’s going on here, Mr. Hendricks? It looks like you’ve turned the place into an orchestra.”
“Well, in a way,” he smiles. “Actually, for the next few weeks this is going to be our sound laboratory.” He moves across the room and picks up an instrument made of wood and wires and plucks one of the wires. At the same time he uses a spoon to strike a soft drink bottle on the desk next to him. “Do you notice anything about these sounds?” he asks, and repeats his plucking and striking.
“Hey,” says one of the girls, “they sound the same, but different.”
“Do it again,” suggests one of the students, and Mr. Hendricks obliges. Soon all of the students have noticed that the sound is at the same pitch or level.
“Your problem,” explains Mr. Hendricks, “is to find out what makes sound vary and to describe that variation. Given the limitations of the devices we have in this room, I want you to organize yourselves to conduct some investigations and present me with sets of principles that you think describe the variations. When you’re finished, I want you to be able to describe to me how you would design an instrument with certain capabilities. I’ll tell you what I want the instrument to be able to do, and you can tell me how to make it. Then we’ll begin to test your ideas.
Now, I think we ought to organize ourselves into groups and decide how we’re going to go about this. Does anybody have any ideas?”
“Well,” Sally ventures, “I’ve noticed that the things are made out of five differ-ent kinds of materials. Maybe we could get into five groups, and each group would experiment with those for a while. Then we could share what we’ve learned and trade around and check out the thinking of the other groups. After that we could decide what to do next.”
Someone joins in with another suggestion, and the class spends the next half hour planning how the study will begin.
As we discussed in the “A Note on Heritage” section in the Front Matter, during the early 1950s into the 1970s, innovation in U.S. education was propelled mainly by the Academic Reform movement. Scientists sought to modernize the curriculum in an effort to revise the conventional subject areas of the school around conceptions of the major ideas and research methods of the academic disciplines. In the area of mathematics, for example, the curriculum designers attempted to influence the way students would think about both the major ideas and the methods they would use to inquire into mathematics. Similarly, the science curricula reflected both the major ideas of the sciences and the research methods and attitudes of the scientific community. In other words, curricula were built around the information‑ processing systems of the academic
disciplines. Similar curricula continue to be developed, and research and development is active, especially in the sciences and social science education.
Major new curricula were developed in physics, chemistry, biology, and general science courses and the social sciences. Importantly, the National Science Teachers Association has many members who continue to develop lessons, units, and courses and share them on the web. The organization’s journal, Science Teacher, provides many high‑ quality, easily accessible ideas and materials. Similarly, the members of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) have been active developers. The NCSS journals Social Education and Social Studies for Young Children are filled with ideas and guides to instructional materials. If you are a new teacher, we strongly recom‑
mend that you join the organizations if possible. The PBS collection of videos from the Nova and Nature programs is also invaluable both to acquaint our‑
selves with a wide variety of scientific investigations and for our students fourth grade and up. We make these same recommendations for experienced teachers.
Because we cannot deal with all the sciences, engineering, and technology
Because we cannot deal with all the sciences, engineering, and technology