Science 101

From the Editor

This sequence of lessons has students observing erosion and creating ideas about factors that affect erosion. Then, as a class, students first explore the impact of vegetation on erosion. Then, groups of students more independently investigate the impact of slope and amount of water on erosion.

This article presents a tool that teachers can use to support children in planning science investigations. Using an extended example from a second-grade investigation into seed dispersal, we describe strategies for structuring conversations that anchor investigations in phenomena and provide opportunities for students to be involved in making decisions about what materials to use in an investigation, how to use materials, and what to look for or count as evidence. These teaching strategies can support children to engage deeply in science practice, while also keeping activity manageable for students and their teachers. Our goal is that this article will provide teachers and curriculum designers with a tool that they can use to support children to engage in joyful, meaningful, and productive science investigations.

The Next Generation Science Standards hold promise for cultivating the diverse assets that students bring to science learning. One key asset in linguistically diverse science classrooms is translanguaging, or the use of one’s full communicative repertoire that transcends boundaries between named languages (e.g., Spanish and English) and modalities (e.g., linguistic and nonlinguistic). For teachers to harness this asset, they will need to hone their skills at formative assessment, specifically, how they listen and respond to students’ thinking communicated in ways that go beyond what has been traditionally privileged in science classrooms (e.g., written English). We refer to this as formative assessment from a translanguaging perspective. In this article, we illustrate how one fifth-grade teacher engaged in formative assessment from a translanguaging perspective in her dual language science classroom during a 3-day lesson focused on planning and carrying out an investigation of plant growth. Specifically, we illustrate how this teacher used multiple types of formative assessment that cultivated her students’ translanguaging and enabled her to stay closely attuned to students’ thinking as it developed. We close with recommendations for teachers interested in enhancing their formative assessment in linguistically diverse science classrooms.

Teachers are often required to display or explicitly state learning objectives prior to beginning a lesson. In particular, many elementary classrooms are required to post or state “I CAN…” statements related to their standards. Unfortunately, this practice can ‘give away’ what students should be figuring out, decrease students’ ‘need to know’ or motivation for learning about the phenomenon, and/or narrow what students notice or connect during the lesson. Here, we provide three strategies that may assist teachers in meeting their schools’ requirements while preserving students’ sense of wonder and ability to engage in sensemaking: 1) Delay sharing the learning objective until after the lesson and use it to metacognitively check understanding; 2) Frame learning objectives in terms of the Crosscutting Concept or/or Science and Engineering Practice; and 3) Create a question map to think more deeply about the core ideas embedded in the standard(s). We encourage teachers to consider how to present the learning objective as a vital part of the lesson planning process and recommend that they try these strategies individually or in combination to find what works best for their classroom.