This week in education news, a preview of what the science standards look like in the classroom; California students go online in record numbers to take standardized tests aligned with the Common Core; computational thinking brings extensive learning benefits; virtual reality offers real rewards in education; President Trump’s school choice plan could stall; Idaho lawmaker praises new proposed standards; and DeVos releases statement supporting President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement.

Water Filters And Space: A Glimpse Into A Next-Generation Science Classroom

Sometimes showing is easier than telling. That’s certainly the case in trying to capture the Next Generation Science Standards—the K-12 learning benchmarks that 18 states and the District of Columbia have adopted and are now using in classrooms. Unlike some previous science standards that focused on the facts, these standards emphasize action. They ask students to construct models, interpret data, design structures, and make arguments. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

CA Students Go Online In Record Numbers To Take Common Core-Aligned Tests

Over the past several weeks, California students in record numbers have been taking once controversial standardized tests aligned with the Common Core. This is the third year that students in the grades 3-8, as well as 11th-graders, have taken the full battery of tests based on new Common Core standards in math and English language arts. The tests can take up to six hours to complete for students in grades 3-5, six-and-a-half hours for students in grades 6-8 and seven-and-a-half hours for 11th-graders. However, there is no time limit on the tests which are part of the California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress. The system also includes new pilot tests administered to students in grades 5, 8 and one year of high school based on the Next Generation Science Standards. Click here to read the article featured in EdSource.

Thinking Like A Computer Brings Wide Learning Benefits

A large gap between the number of computer science graduates and available jobs has led an increasing number of districts to boost instruction in computational thinking. The concept refers to the thought process of expressing a solution to a problem with a series of sequenced steps. It’s a critical part of computer programming and it can assist learning in all disciplines. Click here to read the article featured in District Administration.

Rethinking The Metaphors We Teach By

As teachers, teacher educators, and school leaders, we often discuss the implications of policies and working conditions on our ability to teach effectively. What we don’t say is that our common ways of describing teaching and learning—often metaphorical—pose hidden obstacles. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

Virtual Reality Offers Real Rewards In Education

The architecture, construction, engineering and health science industries already use virtual reality, and educators throughout the country are beginning to consider ways to introduce virtual, augmented and mixed reality to prepare students for college and the workforce. “It’s important to teach students early how to interact and engage with this technology because it’s going to be part of their professional lives,” says Mark Cheben, global marketing director of EON Reality. Click here to read the article featured in District Administration.

Trump’s School Choice Plan Could Quickly Stall In Washington, Analysts Say

Plans to expand school choice from President Donald Trump may be generating a lot of attention—but they should be taken with a dose of political reality, and not obscure other key issues. That was one of the main messages from a panel of K-12 advocates discussing the changing politics of education at the annual conference of the Education Writers Association here on Wednesday. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

GOP Lawmaker Praises Proposed New Science Standards

One Republican member of the House Education Committee said he is impressed with proposed academic science standards that a committee of teachers released last month. But a Boise Democrat, who pushed for an open dialogue on science and climate change, said the decision to remove references to global warming from the standards amounted to partisan politics and science denial. Click here to read the article featured in Idaho Ed News.

New Guide On Undergraduate STEM Education

The Association of American Universities, which works, in part, to improve math, science, engineering and technology education for undergraduates, released a report on “Essential Questions and Data Sources for Continuous Improvement of Undergraduate STEM Teaching and Learning.” It includes questions to aid faculty discussions on STEM education at the course, department, division and campus level on pedagogy, scaffolding and cultural change. Click here to read the article featured in Inside Higher Ed.

Betsy DeVos Applauds Trump For Pulling U.S. Out Of Historic Climate Accord

President Trump on Thursday announced his decision to pull out of the landmark Paris climate agreement — the one that virtually all countries in the world signed onto except Syria and Nicaragua — and his education secretary, Betsy DeVos, was part of the cheering section. Click here to read the article featured in The Washington Post.

Stay tuned for next week’s top education news stories.

The Communication, Legislative & Public Affairs (CLPA) team strives to keep NSTA members, teachers, science education leaders, and the general public informed about NSTA programs, products, and services and key science education issues and legislation. In the association’s role as the national voice for science education, its CLPA team actively promotes NSTA’s positions on science education issues and communicates key NSTA messages to essential audiences.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

Follow NSTA

In science classes, do students work better in random groups or with their friends? I’m a student teacher in middle school. – S., Arizona

Most teachers will tell you there is no best way to set up groups. There are many variables, including the age of the students, the structure of the investigation, the students’ experience levels, and the classroom social climate.

Thoughts from my experience in middle school:

• Use random assignment for the first few activities. You can observe the students’ interpersonal skills, work habits, and which students do and do not work well together.
• With student-selected groups, I was concerned about the students who were selected last (or not at all) and that students wouldn’t learn how to work with a variety of people. Sometimes friends would focus more on social aspects.
• I found heterogeneous grouping by ability worked best for my classes most of the time, and single-gender groups provided more opportunities for equitable student participation.
• I usually structured the groups, changing them periodically. Sometimes, students with an intense interest on a topic worked together.
• Although I rotated cooperative roles, I would usually try to keep the groups intact for a unit. This also saved time, because the students knew who their partners were and which lab table was theirs.
• Check with the teacher of special needs students to determine any accommodations specified in their individual education plans.
• Regardless of how you structure the groups, you may need to model what cooperative behavior looks like, and work with them on appropriate language.

You have a great opportunity for action research as you try different configurations and note which ones seem to work better for your students.

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ielesvinyes/6725332973

“Regardless of the curriculum, it is important to remember that every lesson portrays an image of science to students and conveys information about what science is and how science works.”

-Deborah L. Hanuscin and Eun J. Lee, Perspectives: Helping Students Understand the Nature of Science. March 2009 Science and Children 46(7): 64-65

One of the four-year-old preschoolers I taught could name almost every model and make of car that passed us on our walk to the park and he wasn’t reading the words on the back of the car. He had spent time with his father, learning to classify them by looking at cars, and talking about them and their identifying features. I could not join in his discussion because I was woefully ignorant of what makes a Chevy a Chevy. But I knew many names of plants in the park and their lifecycle and was eager to share that information with the children.  

When children are enthralled with a topic that is not familiar to us, we may seek to direct their interest to a topic we know more about. Sometimes the information is important for getting along with others, such as taking turns at the drinking fountain. Other times, it is a teacher’s favorite topic, like plants are for me. Acknowledging children’s interests meant switching up my plans. Our class didn’t have a safe front door stoop for observing passing traffic, but we did have a collection of mini model cars that also represented a variety of makes and models. These models served to introduce the topic of using models to represent real objects and ideas—one of the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices (NSTA Lead states)—and to introduce the topic of making observations, which is part of the nature of science (NOS). The NOS is usually described as having six to eight aspects, including understanding the difference between observation and inference and that scientific knowledge is both tentative and reliable. (Lederman and Lederman 2004; Quigley 2011).

Through observation of real cars and videos, children knew that to make a real car move, a key is needed to start it, and that some cars are designed to go faster than others. They inferred that the models of “fast” cars would go faster on ramps they constructed in the block area based on their prior experience of viewing those cars in videos. They revised their understanding of how those model cars moved during the many days they tested their ideas, rolling the cars down constructed ramps. Through their explorations of the motion of objects on inclined planes they were beginning to understand that their initial understanding of object motion was tentative and could change with additional experience and testing. There were many variables: wheel size, weight of the model car, distribution of mass, and smoothness of the movement of the axles. The preschool children were not conducting controlled experiments, but the testing by different young scientists reliably produced the same results—certain cars always got down the ramps faster than other cars—and the children revised their understanding.

At the park the children also used the NGSS practices of analyzing and interpreting data and using mathematics and computational thinking as they collected dandelion buds in varying states of bloom—unopened buds, full open yellow blooms, and spherical seed heads—learning about a plant life cycle as we explored the park.

Ashbrook, P. 2014. The Early Years: The Nature of Science in Early Childhood. Science and Children. 52(1): 24-25.

Lederman, N.G., and J.S. Lederman. 2004. Revising instruction to teach nature of science. The Science Teacher 71 (9): 36–39.

NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For states, by states, APPENDIX F – Science and Engineering Practices in the NGSS. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 

Quigley, C., G. Buck, and V. Akerson. 2011. The nature of science challenge. Science and Children 49 (2): 57–61.

WGBH Educational Foundation, Peep and the BIG Wide World. Explore Ramps. Week 2: Building More Ramps, Day 5—Watch and Discuss: Ramp Rolling

Are you interested in enhancing your STEM teaching repertoire? Or in integrating engineering concepts but not sure where to start? There have been some new features added to a free resource which is appropriate for in-school and informal K-12 educators.

The TeachEngineering digital library is an online collection with more than 1,500 engineering curricular materials that were created and tested in classrooms through teacher/faculty partnerships at engineering colleges and funded by the National Science Foundation. The focus of these materials is to support K-12 STEM literacy through the lens of engineering—which involves making real-world connections.

These comprehensive STEM lessons and hands-on activities use engineering to integrate science (life, earth and physical science) and math via hands-on inquiry-based activities that are aligned to NGSS.  TeachEngineering’s curricular materials are presented in five different formats: lessons, hands-on activities, units, “sprinkles,” and maker challenges.

The lessons and hands-on activities provide standard components such as learning objectives, correlations to educational standards, background information, activity prep and procedures, vocabulary, engineering connections, embedded assessment activities, and student worksheets and handouts. Units are groupings of lessons and activities on a common theme or topic.

Some of the most popular activities are also presented as sprinkles–60-minute-or-less “tastes of engineering” that are designed for quick prep by teachers and non-teachers and are appropriate for afterschool clubs and other informal environments (They are also available in Spanish).

Maker Challenges are a new feature providing teacher-prompts for open-ended, self-directed challenges that support the popular maker movement. Through these challenges, students tinker and create as they work through the engineering design process.

It’s easy to explore the collection from the home page for the monthly Editor’s Pick, most popular (elementary, middle, and high school levels), most shared, and recently added. You can use the filtering interface to search and browse the collection by topic, format, grade level, subject area, time required, and/or NGSS.

These resources are complete enough that even if you never studied engineering, you and your students can be involved in interesting problem-solving activities that incorporate real-world applications. Many of the activities and units are in the SciLinks database, too.

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/lalunablanca/24455707/

How can a teacher build and maintain a learning environment that will help students investigate meaningful questions? That’s the central question of The Power of Investigating: Guiding Authentic Assessments by Julie V. McGough and Lisa M. Nyberg.

The pedagogical picture book for K–5 teachers provides practical advice for building investigations that integrate both STEM and literacy skills. It’s the second book in the NSTA Press Powerful Practices series.

Investigations serve to enrich the curriculum and make it real for students. “Hands-on, meaningful investigations give life to learning, inspire questions, and engage students and teachers in thinking,” McGough and Nyberg explain in Part 1.  From words and images on a page to active engagement, investigations transform learning experiences from being two-dimensional to being three-dimensional.

The book focuses on how teachers can use investigations to support a curriculum aligned with the science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas, and crosscutting concepts that are outlined in the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

“The Powerful Practices instructional model provides a canvas to integrate the questions, investigations, and assessments that help teachers and students make sense of the content. Integration of those three components offers a means to engage students and teachers in the dynamic experience of life and learning,” the authors write.

The Power of Investigating offers valuable insights, including practical strategies for helping young scientists investigate meaningful questions and communicate their findings, ideas for finding the resources you need to undertake investigations in your classroom, models of five types of investigations that can help to improve your students’ literacy skills, and tips for maximizing instructional time by integrating the NGSS, Common Core State Standards, your state’s science standards, and best practices in STEM education.

The book mixes text, lesson ideas, photos, and activities with video clips that you can access using a QR code. For example, in Part 1, students learn about worms. In their science journals students can record their initial observations. They can make closer observations using a microscope to study the features of the worm, noticing the worm’s rings, the texture of its skin. Students can draw pictures of their observations and read a nonfiction text that introduces concepts and vocabulary. Then, in a class discussion students can share their observations and ask questions, like “What are the lines on a worm for?” or “How do worms move without feet?”  Also, the bonus video explains how three-dimensional learning experiences can help to build literacy skills.

The worm investigation allows students to learn while getting their hands dirty. It’s fun and engaging and guaranteed to be more memorable than just skimming a page in a textbook.

Learn more by reading the sample chapter, “How Do I Integrate Investigations?”

This book is also available as an e-book.

Save Now on Book Purchases!

Between now and May 31, 2017, save $15 off your order of $75 or more of NSTA Press books or e-books by entering promo code BOOK17 at checkout in the online Science Store. Offer valid only on orders placed of NSTA Press books or e-books on the web and may not be combined with any other offer.

This week in education news, Idaho releases revamped science standards proposal; two University of Florida professors explain how the taunting of minority students in a robotics competition are part of a cultural idea that minority students don’t belong in STEM classes; new 3-minute videos highlight new research in STEM education; next-generation science tests slowly take shape; and according to the Center on Education Policy, students spend an average of 10 days out of the school year taking district-mandated tests and nine days taking state-required tests.

Idaho Releases Revamped Science Standards Proposal

A state committee has made another attempt to break a deadlock over addressing climate change in Idaho classrooms. But the last word in this controversy belongs to Idaho lawmakers — who removed references to climate change from state science standards earlier this year. The State Department of Education unveiled five new climate change standards with wording designed to address lawmakers’ concerns. Click here to read the article featured in Idaho Ed News.

Keeping Up With STEM In The Classroom

Job readiness and transferable skills are things you don’t typically associate with elementary students. Yet to pursue careers as mechanical engineers or computer scientists as adults, children need to develop their interests in and aptitudes for such fields at an early age. The pressure that schools and teachers face to increase STEM education is real. Starting in 2019, elementary and secondary teachers in Washington state will have to document professional development in STEM in order to renew their teaching certificates. Click here to read the article featured in The Seattle Times.

Minority Students Face Cultural Barriers To STEM Education

Two University of Florida professors, no strangers to the entry barriers for minority students in science, technology, engineering and math fields, explain how the taunting of minority students in a robotics competition are part of a cultural idea that minority students don’t belong in STEM classes. Click here to read the article featured in the Gainesville Sun.

Quick-Hit Videos Highlight New Research In STEM Education

Researchers working on federally funded STEM education projects have created three-minute videos about their efforts, which are now being featured as part of a weeklong virtual event. More than 170 video presentations were submitted for the 2017 NSF STEM for All Video Showcase. The research projects described, most of which are being funded by the National Science Foundation, cover a wide range of topics in science, technology, engineering, and math education, such as using virtual reality to give students field experiences and pairing undergraduates with K-12 students to serve as STEM mentors. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

What’s More Important: Credentials or Experience?

Not all teachers are created equally and neither are the programs that made them that way. And so it’s true for administrative licenses and programs as well. Although I’m certain there are important lessons to be learned in the graduate classroom for an administrative license and some may take much away from it, I’m willing to argue that on-the-job training and experience are equally as valuable, if not more. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

The Little-Known Statistician Who Taught Us To Measure Teachers

Students enroll in a teacher’s classroom. Nine months later, they take a test. How much did the first event, the teaching, cause the second event, the test scores? Students have vastly different abilities and backgrounds. A great teacher could see lower test scores after being assigned unusually hard-to-teach kids. A mediocre teacher could see higher scores after getting a class of geniuses. Thirty-five years ago, a statistician, William S. Sanders, offered an answer to that puzzle. It relied, unexpectedly, on statistical methods that were developed to understand animal breeding patterns. Click here to read the article featured in The New York Times.

Next-Generation Science Tests Slowly Take Shape

Around the country, science instruction is changing—students are being asked to make models, analyze data, construct arguments, and design solutions in ways that far exceed schools’ previous goals. That means science testing, of course, needs to change as well. Yet considering federal requirements around science testing, and states’ logistical, technical, and financial limitations, putting a new, performance-heavy state science test in place is no easy task. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

Why Science Denial Isn’t Necessarily Ideological

Science is taking it from all sides these days. On the right are those who question the reality of climate change and doubt the theory of evolution. On the left are those who inveigh against vaccines and fear genetically modified foods. Those who do accept the authority of science watch helplessly as funding for research is threatened, all the while bemoaning the warping influence of political ideology on the beliefs of their compatriots. Into this sorry state of affairs arrive two new books, each of which draws on a different body of research to make the same surprising claim: that the misunderstanding and denial of science is not driven exclusively or even primarily by ideology. Rather, scientific ignorance stems from certain built-in features of the human mind — all of our minds. Click here to read the article featured in the Washington Post.

Assessment: Getting A Read On A Field In Flux

Students spend an average of 10 days out of the school year taking district-mandated tests and nine days taking state-required tests, according to the Center on Education Policy. Over 12 years of schooling, that adds up to nearly four months of a young person’s life. The estimate provides a starting point for wrapping one’s mind around the amount of testing students actually do in schools. While most of the teachers who responded to the center survey thought states and districts should cut back on the time students spend taking mandated tests, only a fraction of them wanted to dump those tests altogether. Click here to read the article featured in Education Week.

How Science Standards Went Mainstream Without Common Core’s Drama

Chad Colby, the vice president of strategic communications and outreach for Achieve, spoke with InsideSources about the processes that led to the creation of the NGSS, and how the groups involved were able to sidestep much of the political controversy that engulfed the Common Core. Colby, a former official at the U.S. Department of Education, is a proponent of the NGSS, which he said takes a more holistic view of the subject and encourages active exploration rather than passive memorization. Though the NGSS were created separately from Common Core, the standards are designed to link up together—should educators decide to take a cross-disciplinary approach to curricular development. Click here to read the article featured in InsideSources.

Stay tuned for next week’s top education news stories.

The Communication, Legislative & Public Affairs (CLPA) team strives to keep NSTA members, teachers, science education leaders, and the general public informed about NSTA programs, products, and services and key science education issues and legislation. In the association’s role as the national voice for science education, its CLPA team actively promotes NSTA’s positions on science education issues and communicates key NSTA messages to essential audiences.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

Follow NSTA

At the recent NSTA National Conference in Los Angeles, three-dimensional learning was, of course, a major topic of discussion. When those discussions focus on classroom instruction, though, the crosscutting concepts are often the forgotten dimension. Some educators argue that the crosscutting concepts should develop in students’ minds organically, and that it’s enough for a teacher to simply guide students to reflect on a learning experience to find connections to those concepts. Other educators see the value in making the crosscutting concepts more explicit for students, but they find it difficult to do so. We fell into this second camp. 

We realized the crosscutting concepts are valuable tools for helping students develop, understand, and connect disciplinary core ideas and practices across learning experiences.  However, we wondered how we could help students make these connections in effective ways.  We started to see the answer to that question after reviewing the plant growth and gas exchange unit developed at Michigan State University (MSU). The matter and energy process tool used in that unit provides explicit scaffolding for students as they apply the Energy and Matter crosscutting concept to phenomena ranging from a drying sponge to a growing tree. This scaffold helps students see the structure of the crosscutting concept, and it forces them to connect general, abstract ideas about matter and energy with specific, concrete phenomena. Once we considered this tool, we envisioned ways to help students develop their ability to apply the crosscutting concepts when analyzing phenomena.

With this model in mind, we developed a series of graphic organizers (available as Google Slides) that scaffold each of the seven crosscutting concepts for middle and high school students. As we did this, we wanted to be sure to address the most important aspects of each concept. To accomplish this, we referred extensively to the explanations of each crosscutting concept in the Framework for K–12 Science Education (ch. 4, pp. 83–102) and to the grade- band progressions on the NGSS@NSTA Hub.

Crosscutting Concepts Progressions

1. Patterns
2. Cause and Effect
3. Scale, Proportion, and Quantity
4. Systems and System Models
5. Energy and Matter
6. Structure and Function
7. Stability and Change

For example, the overall description for Cause and Effect on the Hub states, “deciphering causal relationships, and the mechanisms by which they are mediated, is a major activity of science and engineering.” As a result, the mechanism linking the two events in a cause-effect relationship is a central feature of our Cause and Effect graphic organizer.

As you review the remaining graphic organizers, you will see that we adapted MSU’s Matter and Energy Process Tool only slightly. You’ll also notice eight graphic organizers, one more than the seven crosscutting concepts. We believe Scale, Proportion, and Quantity had two key aspects that could not both be represented in a single graphic organizer. The Scale organizer is actually inspired by another tool from the same MSU unit.

You will also see that each graphic organizer prompts students to apply the crosscutting concept to a specific phenomenon. We want students to think not in generalities, such as how the structure of cell organelles promotes the cell’s function, but rather in more specifically grounded ideas, such as why a person with a mitochondrial disease experiences chronic fatigue.

Finally, you’ll see considerable overlap across the graphic organizers, particularly regarding the role of evidence in supporting claims. This reinforces the idea that the crosscutting concepts are not isolated ideas, but interrelated lenses that scientists and engineers use to understand and analyze phenomena and problems.

What does this look like in the classroom? Teachers have used the graphic organizers in scenarios ranging from students analyzing the cause and mechanism of swarming locusts after reading an article about the phenomenon to using a modified version of the Matter and Energy graphic organizer to analyze changes in matter that occurred during a reaction in a bag activity.

One of our favorite uses is in a storyline we developed to investigate the causes of land and sea breezes at the beach. After viewing a video of a flag at the beach blowing in different directions during the day and night, students engage in a series of investigations to help them understand the factors contributing to this phenomenon.

Students then use the Cause and Effect graphic organizer  to make sense of how these factors (differential heating of land and water, air pressure, convection, and so on) cause the flag to blow in different directions at different times. The key is that students are actively using the graphic organizer to help them comprehend the phenomenon. They are not simply taking notes about the phenomenon or about the general ideas of the crosscutting concept.

We encourage you to try out these graphic organizers, and we hope they will help you make the crosscutting concepts more explicit and more useful for your students. We hope your students will see the graphic organizers and the crosscutting concepts themselves as thinking tools that will help them make sense of the world around them and connect various phenomena and core ideas. As you use these resources with your students, we would love to hear about your experiences and welcome your feedback.

Jeremy Peacock

Jeremy Peacock, Ed.D., is Director of 6-12 Science at Northeast Georgia Regional Education Service Agency in Winterville, Georgia, and an NGSS@NSTA Curator.  He is also a past President of the Georgia Science Teachers Association and a former environmental scientist and high school biology teacher. He is currently focused on supporting Georgia teachers in implementing their new state-developed three-dimensional science standards.

Amy Peacock

Amy Peacock, Ph.D., is the K-12 Science Content Coach in the Clarke County School District in Athens, Georgia, and the outgoing President of the Georgia Science Supervisors Association. She is a former food scientist and high school chemistry teacher.  She provides professional learning, coaching, and support for science teachers in her district.

Visit NSTA’s NGSS@NSTA Hub for hundreds of vetted classroom resources, professional learning opportunities, publications, ebooks and more; connect with your teacher colleagues on the NGSS listservs (members can sign up here); and join us for discussions around NGSS at an upcoming conference.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

Future NSTA Conferences

STEM Forum & Expo

• Kissimmee/Orlando: July 12–14, 2017

2017 Fall Conferences

• Baltimore: Oct. 5–7, 2017
• Milwaukee: Nov. 9–11, 2017
• New Orleans: Nov. 30–Dec. 2, 2017

National Conference

• Atlanta: March 15–18, 2018

Follow NSTA

At the core of a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) classroom is the sequence of exposing students to an interesting natural phenomenon, having students generate questions about the phenomenon, investigating student questions, then creating a scientific model to explain the phenomenon. Regardless of the practice defined in the performance expectation, this triad of phenomenon, questioning, and modeling should be incorporated into most NGSS lesson sequences.

One of the fifth-grade performance expectations (5-ESS1-1) is about supporting an argument concerning the apparent brightness of stars with respect to the stars’ distance from Earth. Before students can support an argument, they need to explore the nature of light and determine what happens to light as it travels through the universe. Students begin by viewing photographs of the night sky and generating questions. The following are examples of student-generated questions:

• Why do some stars twinkle?
• Why are some of the stars in groups and some spread out?
• How far away are the stars? Are some nearer to Earth and some farther away?
• Why do some stars appear bluish, some yellowish, and some reddish?
• Why do some stars look big and other stars appear little?
• When a star is really bright, is it closer to Earth?

I post many of these questions on the wall, and we focus on certain groups of questions as we proceed through the sequence of lessons. We take the questions about differences in stars with respect to size and brightness and turn them into questions we can investigate. For these lessons, we decided on this question: How is the brightness of light affected by the distance from the source of light?

Student groups were given access to a darkened room and provided with flashlights, meter sticks, and black paper and white paper. They chose their own method to find an answer to the question.

After the investigation, they were asked to use pictures and words to document their results. In this case, they used the left side of the piece of paper and labeled the right side with “The Real World,” with the instruction that this would be completed later. This is an example of student work.

After student groups generated initial explanations of their results, we critiqued and revised them. This was a new skill for my fifth graders, so we conducted this process as a group. I projected images of the students’ work and asked them to decide on one suggestion that would improve the explanation and one suggestion they could use to improve their own explanation. The class discussion included the following:

• What suggestions can you give to improve this? What can you take from this explanation to improve your own?
• Show the “light beam” between the flashlight and the circle of light.
• Did you use the same flashlight, or did you use two flashlights? If you used two flashlights, was one brighter and the other dimmer?
• Did you measure the size of the circle of light? If so, you should put your measurements on your explanation.
• Did you measure the distance between the flashlight and the circle of light? If you did, you should show the measurements on your explanation.
• Did you only try two different positions of the flashlight? What would happen if the flashlight was even further away?

The main part of discussion revolved around the “light beam” and what must be happening for the circle of light to get both bigger and dimmer. Students were given the opportunity to modify or supplement their diagram to incorporate additional information. The biggest change in most of the explanations was the addition of the light beam. Students discovered that it must spread out more as it moves away from the source. Many student groups returned to the flashlights to test and verify their ideas about how the light travelled as it left the source.

The next step was to have students transfer the results of their investigation. Students were supplied with flashlights and globes to determine how this happens in the real world. Students documented their understanding of the real world. Here are some examples:

After generating these real-world explanations, we came together again to examine images and brainstorm ideas for making them more accurate. The discussion focused on the question of whether the Sun is actually much bigger than other stars. Students realized that the Sun looks big because it is close, but it is actually not a big star.

As a final step in the process of understanding why closer stars look brighter, individual students were asked to share their final thoughts about this topic. Students showed varying levels of understanding about the topic, but most demonstrated they understood that the light from a distant object spreads out and therefore appears dimmer than the light from a closer source.

Kathy Gill

Kathy Gill is a science specialist at Willett Elementary School in Davis, California. She guides fourth- and fifth-grade students in exploring and explaining interesting scientific phenomena.

 

 

Visit NSTA’s NGSS@NSTA Hub for hundreds of vetted classroom resources, professional learning opportunities, publications, ebooks and more; connect with your teacher colleagues on the NGSS listservs (members can sign up here); and join us for discussions around NGSS at an upcoming conference.

The mission of NSTA is to promote excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all.

Future NSTA Conferences

STEM Forum & Expo

• Kissimmee/Orlando: July 12–14, 2017

2017 Fall Conferences

• Baltimore: Oct. 5–7, 2017
• Milwaukee: Nov. 9–11, 2017
• New Orleans: Nov. 30–Dec. 2, 2017

National Conference

• Atlanta: March 15–18, 2018

Follow NSTA

Four years ago, I moved from teaching middle school science to teaching grades 2–5 STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) labs. One of the biggest challenges I faced was limited lab time in our elementary school. Because we shared instructional time with social studies, I was only able to meet with students for two 40-minute periods a week for half the year.

I had many other challenges as well. I had to adjust my planning for younger students, and learn to work effectively with co-teachers whose main focus was English language arts (ELA) and mathematics. Elementary science had been taught from dog-eared textbooks that were older than the students we were teaching, and teachers had relied heavily on worksheets and recall assessments. I knew three-dimensional instruction—as promoted in A Framework for K–12 Science Education (Framework) and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)—presented a daunting paradigm shift for teachers, but I was confident the new standards would yield significant benefits for student engagement and learning.

I think that using the three dimensions helps me maximize student learning. I plan lab investigations, problem-based learning projects, and engineering design challenges to help students apply and extend their classroom learning as they engage in science and engineering practices to solve problems. Crosscutting concepts, in particular, provide an essential, highly useful schema for intentional three-dimensional planning because they offer a big-picture perspective that helps me plan instruction with recurring themes as students’ progress through elementary science. According to the Framework, “Explicit reference to the concepts, as well as their emergence in multiple disciplinary contexts, can help students develop a cumulative, coherent, and usable understanding of science and engineering.”

Crosscutting concepts make intuitive sense to my youngest students, especially the concept of structure and function. For example, my second-grade unit on interdependent relationships in ecosystems features a modeling project to address 2-LS2-2, “Develop a simple model that mimics the function of an animal in dispersing seeds or pollinating plants.” We begin by viewing a video of a dog running through a field, collecting burrs on its coat, then shaking them off. I ask students if they have ever walked through the woods or a field and found burrs stuck to their socks or shoes. I inquire, “How do you think the burr sticks to your socks?”

We examine seeds with hand lenses and a 3D microscope, and view online images of seeds with hooks and spikes. I then ask why students think a plant would produce seeds with hook and spike structures. (Note: Before this lab lesson, students had explored seed dispersal by wind and water, and had discussed the importance of seeds traveling away from their parent plant for greater access to resources like water, sunlight, and space for their roots to spread.)

Students observe that the hooks help the seed get carried to a new spot where it can have a better chance of growing, and I introduce the term function. Function is the structure’s job: how it works to help the plant. We also examine examples of seeds surrounded by fruit and discuss how fruit is a structure that functions to attract an animal, helping a seed get dispersed. Of course, this produces much hilarity in the room as students realize how the seed eventually gets deposited in a new location, accompanied by a useful helping of fertilizer.

Squirrel with cheek pouch structures that function to carry nuts

I introduce an engineering design challenge: “Use the engineering design process to design, construct, evaluate, and present a simple model that mimics the function of an animal in dispersing a plant’s seeds. Your model must show the animal and seed structures (parts) and show how they function (work) to make seed dispersal possible.”

Bird disperses berry seeds through a drinking straw digestive tube

Students explore structure and function in third grade as they design a desert plant with adaptations to absorb and store water during a flash flood and to prevent water loss that occurs through evaporation. Before designing their plant, teams test various materials for speed of water absorption and structural integrity when wet.

Students wrapped their plant’s above ground structures in waxed paper or plastic wrap to function to prevent evaporation.

Data dashboard

Our Primary School’s Data Dashboard is posted prominently on a cafeteria wall. Each grade is responsible for recording daily precipitation (grade 2), hours of daylight (grade 1), and high and low temperatures (kindergarten). Teachers bring their students to the cafeteria with clipboards to ask questions and look for patterns, a crosscutting concept. Opportunities abound for discussing additional crosscutting concepts at our Data Dashboard, such as cause and effect and stability and change.

Recently, I participated in a Twitter chat on crosscutting concepts #elngsschat, one of my favorite Twitter chats for sharing ideas for elementary science teaching. Participants are enthusiastic, passionate science educators, eager to share their ideas, successes, and failures. Elementary science teachers can use this chat and hashtag to build a supportive PLN—especially helpful if you teach in a small district with limited science specialist teaching staff. As we continue to progress in our NGSS implementation journey, I look forward to hearing other educators’ experiences with teaching crosscutting concepts at all grade levels.

Beth Topinka

Beth Topinka is the S.T.E.A.M. lab teacher for grades 2–5 at Millstone Township School District in central New Jersey. She’s a vocal advocate for interdisciplinary, problem-based learning, and loves to create and share engaging 3D investigations and engineering challenges. She is a Science Friday Educator Collaborator, and was recently named a Science Channel Science Superhero. Topinka was selected as a state finalist for the 2016 Presidential Awards for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching.

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