A fourth grade student was given a lengthy assignment that required much Internet “research.”  I put the word research in quotes since the word was used, but not necessarily in the spirit of its traditional meaning let alone its direct implications in science.

The student spent many hours searching Internet sites for the various facts necessary to complete the assignment. This was not the usual webquest task, but more like a term paper with a seemingly unlimited number of questions. As each answer was found, a website citation was required to be included with the content gleaned from the Internet.

Finally the student hit a wall. Although hard to believe, there seemed to be no information on the Internet about the very specific topic in question. At least none easily accessible with Google.

This so-called student of the twenty-first century, like many others when faced with a digital challenge, simply engineered a digital solution. In this particular case, the question on the assignment was entered into the Ask.com website where it was offered up to the world as one in need of an answer.

And in true web 2.0 form the same student then went ahead and submitted an answer to the question!

Now, with answer and citation in-hand, the ten-year old student soldiered on with his homework providing the answer and necessary web citation.

The story could end here except the student and assignment were not in a vacuum. Many other students were also working on the same assignment scouring the Internet for specific information at the same time. And with ask.com a popular site for answers, it’s easy to imagine that other diligent fourth graders will also cite the answer as found on “the internet” wholly unaware that the answer was supplied by a fellow student possibly only minutes before. While the debate about the appropriateness of such websites like ask.com is one for a later time, it was clear in this assignment that use of the website was acceptable.

Yes, this is an obvious case study in digital citizenship, the read-write web, academic honesty, and even plagiarism (see Plagiarizing Yourself in the Chronicle). It is also a case study in creative problem solving.

Interestingly this same forth grader appeared in this very blog one year ago when he pushed the limits on another assignment when in third grade.

A significant challenge that science teachers face is how to help students successfully navigate the bridge from their existing ideas about science concepts to scientifically accepted views. A teacher who uncovers students’ preconceptions about key concepts can use that knowledge to provide learning experiences that support students as they develop richer conceptual understanding. The March 2012 issue of NSTA’s Book Beat highlights resources that can help teachers guide their students on the path from misconceptions to clearer understanding. Page Keeley’s Uncovering Student Ideas in Science Series has been a go-to source for many teachers who want to learn more about what students are thinking about gravity, force and motion, cells, life cycles, and numerous other science topics.

This issue of Book Beat links to two free preview chapters from Page Keeley and Cary Sneider’s brand-new Uncovering Student Ideas in Astronomy. What do your students know—or think they know—about what causes night and day, whether the Moon spins, and what happens to stars when they die? The 45 astronomy probes in the new book provide situations that will pique your students’ interest while helping you evaluate their understanding of how the universe operates. The book covers the broad areas of the nature of planet Earth; the Sun-Earth system; modeling the Moon; dynamic solar system; and stars, galaxies, and the universe. Andrew Fraknoi writes in his Foreword to this new book: “Just like a doctor’s diagnostic tool provides one chemical or physical indicator of our health, each of Keeley and Sneider’s probes measures one or two ideas that lets you know how much surgical repair (if any) might be needed to fix up your students’ astronomical ideas.” For additional resources on misconceptions in science, check out the Everyday Science Mysteries Series; Predict, Observe, Explain; and the Brain-Powered Science Series. Additional NSTA Press resources on astronomy include Project Earth Science: Astronomy, Revised 2^nd Edition; and Earth Science Success: 50 Lesson Plans for Grades 6–9.

Can it reflect light? Is it a plant? Is it made of cells? These questions are among more than 100 formative assessment probes developed by Page Keeley and her colleagues to help teachers elicit information about what students think about key science concepts. A capacity crowd at Keeley’s Seattle conference session turned out to learn more about these powerful tools and how to use them in the classroom to delve deeper into student thinking. Keeley began her session, “What Were They Thinking?” by pointing out that teachers realize “students don’t come to us as empty vessels; they have preconceptions about science.”  A teacher who brings those student ideas to the surface can challenge students’ existing ideas and encourage them to think more deeply about a science concept. As Keeley noted, lab equipment like Vernier probes can help us see below the surface and collect additional information, thereby deepening our knowledge. The formative assessment probe is a specific type of question that similarly can help us look beneath the surface to learn more about student thinking.

The probes in Uncovering Student Ideas in Science are engaging questions that promote a lot of talk, argumentation, and thought among students. Teachers who use probes at the beginning of a lesson or unit help make students’ thinking visible to the teacher, the class, and sometimes to the students themselves, who might not have realized their ideas until they were brought to the surface in a probe activity. One probe that Keeley highlighted is “Can It Reflect Light?” Students are given a list of items such as water, soil, mirror, rusty nail, and red apple and asked to sort them into items that reflect light and items that do not. The second part of these activity is the most powerful part, Keeley said, because students are then asked to explain their reasoning for the sorted lists they created. The student explanations give teachers rich insights into preconceptions or gaps in students’ knowledge, thereby guiding the teacher in how to structure an ensuing lesson. Several common ideas students have about light and reflection include the assumption that only light-colored or shiny objects reflect light, for example. A teacher might structure a lesson that offers numerous opportunities for students to explore light and reflectivity to gain first-hand understanding that “if you can see it, it is reflecting light.”

Several different types of questions are used in the probes, including one Keeley called “Familiar Phenomena Probes.” These probes are designed to get at students’ thinking about familiar events. Examples are “Wet Jeans,” in which students ponder where the water has “gone” from a pair of wet jeans that dried while hanging on a clothesline, and “What’s in the Bubbles?”, in which students discuss what they think is in the bubbles that form in boiling water. The probes “What’s in the Bubbles?” and “Can It Reflect Light?” are available for download in the NSTA Science Store. Keeley’s session prompted a lively discussion among the teachers present about commonly held misconceptions and how strongly held they can become among students. Formative assessment probes like those in Uncovering Student Ideas in Science can be just the tool for teachers to employ when urging students to reexamine their existing ideas and deepen their understanding about important concepts in science.

Last year, I started giving pretests at the beginning of each unit. The students were upset because they didn’t know many of the answers, even though I explained I didn’t expect them to know everything and the pretest wouldn’t count as a grade. Are there other ways to find out what students know about a topic?
—Cheri, Bangor, Maine

One of the most important factors influencing students’ learning is not the activities you plan or the materials you use but what students already know about a topic. In her recent Edutopia blog Are You Tapping into Prior Knowledge Often Enough in Your Classroom? Rebecca Alber describes the research on the value of accessing the knowledge, skills, and experiences students bring to a learning unit.

Reflecting on my own experience with middle-schoolers, I probably did not “tap” enough at first. I was so excited about the unit topic and the great activities that students could do. But a student changed my mind. She turned in a test with tears in her eyes. “I know a lot about this, but you didn’t ask the right questions.” I asked her what she meant (the topic was marine invertebrates) and she described her summers at her grandparents’ cottage on the beaches of Florida and the extensive shell collection she had at home. I realized that if I had known that in advance, I could have asked her to share her experiences with the other students, many of whom had never seen the ocean (I should have known that ahead of time, too).

Alber mentions some activities that can help students access their prior knowledge and previous experiences. These can easily be adapted to science learning and included in science notebooks, as alternatives to traditional pretests. These are more open-ended and can tease out things that you may not have considered:

• KWL charts are three-column graphic organizers on which students note what they already (K)now about a topic, what they (W)ant to know, and finally what they (L)earn about a topic. The K and W columns can provide information prior to instruction on students’ knowledge and interests. If your students don’t know what they want to know (for the W column), ask them what they (W)onder about instead.

• Using a visual as a prompt, ask students to list what they know about a topic or to generate a list of related words. As with a KWL chart, students can include what they’ve learned about a topic from a variety of sources, including what they may have learned outside of school

• On a list of key vocabulary or concepts, ask students to put a plus sign next to those they’re comfortable with, a check mark next to those they’ve heard of but are not sure about, and a question mark next to those with which they are completely unfamiliar.

• Alber describes “ABC Brainstorming” in which students think of 26 words related to a topic from A to Z (I’d suggest students use words starting with “ex” for X). I used a similar version but instead of A-Z, students used the letters of their names or the letters in a related term such as “photosynthesis.” Student enjoyed sharing their lists. It’s interesting to do this again at the end of the unit to see if students respond differently or in greater detail.

Assessing students’ prior knowledge can also identify misconceptions or incomplete understandings. Page Keeley has created a series of books on Uncovering Student Ideas in Science. The “probes” in these books are brief activities that help teachers identify students’ preconceptions or misconceptions about a topic.

From a practical standpoint, if you find most have some familiarity with a topic, you won’t need to spend a lot of time reteaching the basics, other than perhaps a brief review. You can develop more in-depth activities and topics that build on the students’ knowledge and experiences. However, if students do not have the background knowledge and skills you expected, you’ll need activities that introduce students to fundamental concepts and processes.

Finding out a students’ prior knowledge can also be helpful in differentiated instruction. Once you identify what experiences and knowledge students have, you can plan activities for those who need basic instruction and for those who are ready for more advanced work.

I would be frustrated when students claimed they were unfamiliar with a topic I knew they’d covered in previous classes.  I found teachers in other years may have used different vocabulary. These activities can refresh students’ memories, helping them realize they knew more than they (and I) thought.

Photograph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rongyos/2686415336/

Table of Contents

This is the latest issue in a well-designed and informative series on inquiry learning. I would encourage secondary teachers to read these issues of Science and Children, especially if you’re new to the idea of inquiry learning or want to see what younger students are capable of. Many of the ideas can be adapted for older students.

Assessment is often an afterthought or something that happens at the end of a unit. As the editor suggests, every assignment can provide evidence of what (and how) students are learning. A formal “test” is not the only tool in your assessment toolkit, and none of the articles here describe how to improve standardized test scores. Rather, they focus on authentic observations, using feedback to choose instructional strategies, and providing useful and appropriate feedback to students. (For example, see Formative Assessment Probes: With a Purpose to differentiate between assessment of learning and assessment for learning.)

As the guest editorial The Changing Landscape of Assessment suggests, “Children, even before kindergarten, are more capable than we ever thought—capable when accessible contexts are used and the classroom environment is geared toward the critique and communication of ideas and information.” What may appear to be play could actually be children’s attempts to explore the world around them.  Measuring Learning includes an activity for younger students to explore temperature changes  [SciLinks: Systems of Measurement, How Can Heat Be Measured? How Can Matter Be Measured?]

You may have read that traditional “cookbook” labs can be revised into inquiry-based ones. Shifting to an Inquiry-Based Experience provides some suggestions for how to do this, along with a sample investigation in electricity. The authors note that the steps can be implemented gradually as students (and the teacher) become more familiar with inquiry. What causes a charge to move from one substance to another? provides background information for teachers. [SciLinks: Electric Current, Current Electricity, Static Electricity]  Whooo Knew? shows how a commonly used activity such as dissecting owl pellets can become an interesting, differentiated project. [SciLinks: Food Chains, Food Webs, Predator/Prey]

Teachers of young children will identify with the author of Capitalizing on Curiosity. He describes his experiences in using what he thought was “chaos” (and haven’t we all had that feeling) to realize that learning was still going on—just not exactly what he thought would happen. By reflecting on the “feedback” from observing and talking with students he gained a better understanding of how they can be involved in inquiry. (Young children seem eager to explore “what would happen if …” I wonder what happens as they get older?) [SciLinks: Buoyancy]

Scientists on a Mission illustrates how studying isopods (aka pillbugs) can be kicked up a few inquiry notches to engage students in making observations, posing questions, and designing an investigation. This could be a good introduction at the beginning of the year to assess students’ previous experiences with inquiry. If the closest your students come to lobsters is at a restaurant, you may have to think of other topics for research as your read The Case of Lobster Shell Disease. The authors provide examples of how they worked on projects with students to investigate a topic of local interest, and they share their tools, rubrics, and advice, including “Assessment of student progress is essential throughout the course of the project, not only to determine what methods work best and ensure that students grasped the concepts but also to continually incorporate student inquiries into the lesson material. [SciLinks: Arthropods]

Don’t be mislead by the title of the article Museum Connections. Although the author is a museum educator, the “connections” she’s making relate to how classroom design can facilitate inquiry learning, curiosity, and independence in young students. The self-assessment checklist (see the Connections) can be used to assess how inquiry-friendly your classroom is. (I’m already thinking of how it could be adapted for classrooms in secondary schools.) The article also describes how several teachers used the checklists to redesign their classroom spaces to accommodate various types of learning experiences

Feed Up, Feedback, Feed Forward  may sound confusing, but all three processes were used in a kindergarten lesson on conservation, with a focus on composting. The authors define and describe the terms. Feed up—what’s our purpose? Feedback—how are we doing? Feed forward—where do we go from here. The sample rubric is very student-friendly and could be adapted to other projects [SciLinks: What Is Conservation,  Composting, Decomposers]

And check out more Connections  for this issue (July 2011). Even if the article does not quite fit with your lesson agenda, there are ideas for handouts, background information sheets, data sheets, rubrics, and other resources.

Be sure to follow S&C on Facebook and NSTA on Twitter @NSTA.

Blogs provide a great way to extend the classroom beyond your 45 minute class period.  They can be used in a variety of ways to spark discussion and student research.  Chris Ludwig, a high school science teacher in Colorado, wrote this blog post to show how he used blogs this year to fundamentally change the way he assigned homework.

One of the major changes that I made this year was to switch to using individual student blogs as the centerpiece of student assessment (the other major change was to implement standards-based grading). I started using student blogs for a number of reasons including:

1. I was tired of grading worksheets with the same copied answers on them.
2. I realized that these worksheets weren’t always helpful in learning content, and in fact, much of the time they got in the way of learning.
3. Student in my classes have access to a MacBook cart whenever they are in my classroom and we have fantastically dependable wireless internet connectivity for these laptops (yay tech support!).
4. Blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress are free.
5. I’m increasingly wary of multiple choice anything as real assessment and wanted students to write more.
6. I wanted students to have a permanent, online record of their achievement throughout the year, not some pile of papers shoved in a binder (or trash can).
7. I wanted students to have an audience for their work that would include each other, their families, the community, and the world.

Ludwig continues,

So how did we use the blogs? They became the go-to location to post assignments for me to read and grade. For a week or two, though, I operated a lot like I did last year, posting assignments on Edmodo and using its great assignment features to have students turn things in online, as well as posting them to their blogs. I realized that this was a duplication of effort and soon instead of sending out “assignments” in Edmodo, I just sent files and links as “notes.” This meant that these resources no longer came with a due date and that I was not using Edmodo to see who turned in which assignments.

Read the full post here.

While reviewing some materials from a workshop, I came across a few online gems this week to add to the SciLinks keyword assessment. Even some of the experienced teachers in the workshop had to stop and think about the differences between analytic and holistic rubrics. We were guided to Jon Mueller’s page on Rubrics for a clear and concise discussion, with examples.

Creating analytic rubrics (which include both criteria and descriptions of the levels of performance for each) can be a time-consuming effort (but worth it). The Rubric Maker website looks like a good tool. The full version requires a subscription (for a fee). But there is a free version, the difference being that the finished rubric cannot be saved on the website or shared via the website. It can be downloaded as an Excel or HTML file that maintains the formatting, and the Excel version can be further revised/edited. Once you enter a grade span (Primary, Elementary, Middle, High) and a title, you’re able to choose criteria and descriptors. You can edit most of these to use your own terminology or performance levels.  A nice feature is that it also creates a student “checklist” with a description of each criteria (e.g., I proposed a hypothesis that can be tested by my experiment. I followed safety rules.) This would be really helpful to share with the students. There are other rubric generators on the web, such as Rubistar, which requires a free registration. You can create, save, and print a variety of customized rubrics right from the website.

When I got home from the workshop, I poked around the rest of Dr. Mueller’s site, the Authentic Assessment Toolbox. My reaction was WOW—this is a wonderful tutorial or guide through the process of creating assessments that are based on identified standards/objectives. He writes in a conversational style and includes lots of examples and a glossary of assessment terms. I really enjoyed reading the “Workshops” section which are basically think-alouds as he “converses” with a teacher and guides them through the process.

Exploring these resources could easily be a professional development project on assessment or the development of common rubrics.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mstinas/3188728867/

I’m interested in finding some science assessments to supplement the state tests at the high school level. I’m especially looking for ones that will help me understand students’ thinking.
—Lisa, Fort Myers, Florida

It would be very difficult to find an existing test that matches your curriculum exactly. Some textbooks have test-generators as an option, but the questions and unit topics may not align with your curriculum or match up with your learning objectives (and some of the questions I’ve seen in these resources are not well designed and many of them are focused on factual recall). Another option would be to create the items yourself, but constructing items can be a time-consuming process.

The state science assessments I’m most familiar with give teachers yearly reports on their students’ scores but do not provide information on how the students answered individual items. It can be useful to see what percentage of the students chose the incorrect distracters. This information can help the teacher identify misconceptions and areas in which additional instruction is necessary. But most standardized test results do not provide this type of item analysis.

I’m really interested in the Science Assessment tool recently published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). High school level topics address concepts in life science, physical science, earth science, and the nature of science. For each topic, there are several key ideas and sub-ideas (some schools may refer to these as big ideas and essential concepts) you can match to your science curriculum. Each sub-idea has a collection of multiple-choice items to add to your test bank. The items are designed to help you determine what your students understand and what misconceptions they may bring to class (there’s a section for each item with an analysis of how students in the pilot group answered the questions). You must register (free) to use the site, and you can save the items you select and print them as PDF or HTML files (or copy and paste into a word processor, spread sheet, or test generator).

TIMSS has released items in science and mathematics for grades 4 and 8. A scoring guide is provided for the open-ended questions. Another option would be to look at the website of your state assessment system to find released items and scoring samples for science.

The resources I’ve noted are not test-generators. You would have to copy and paste into your own documents. But the bonus information they provide on misconceptions and how students performed on these items is worth the formatting work. If you use the test (or individual items) with a clicker system, you can get immediate feedback on the students’ answers for your own item analysis.

PALS (Performance Assessment Links in Science) is another resource you could consider. There are dozens of performance assessment tasks, organized by standard, grade level, and topic. Each one references one or more of the National Science Education Standards. Each assessment includes a detailed description, a student handout with places to record data and observations, a scoring rubric, and the results of any formal validation. There are examples of actual student work at each of the rubric levels. This could definitely be a supplement to traditional paper-and-pencil tests.

I’d also recommend the Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series of books from NSTA. These formative assessment probes can help you uncover student preconceptions and can be used as a pre-assessment or warm-up for a unit.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/46632302@N06/4279477491/

The children whom I see once-a-week in an hour-long afternoon science enrichment class show growth in their exploration of building using ramps and blocks to create pathways for balls. These materials have been available each session for about four months. An hour once a week is not much time to explore a set of materials but the children seem to be able to pick up where they left off the last time. They enjoy making the balls go into a goal, creating elaborate structures around a few ramps, and making especially long ramps. Their work had seemed stalled so I assigned a task before building. I wanted to see how the children, ages 3.5-5, would approach the difficult task of drawing the relationship between two 3-D objects so I asked them to make a set-up with any two wooden (unit) building blocks and draw a picture of it. Most of the children made simple line drawings of one face of the blocks with varying degrees of accuracy (some were more oval than rectangular), and a few children traced the shapes. I hoped that this practice drawing would help them begin to think of how 3-D objects can be placed together and that thinking before building might lead to new structures.

(Note: In talking with the children I was searching my brain for the name given to the rectangular block and couldn’t come up with it. Not a cube but a ________. An online resource, The Annenberg Foundation’s Interactives: Geometry 3-D Shapes, gave me the word I was looking for. These unit blocks are polyhedrons, 3-D shapes whose faces are polygons, and specifically right prism polyhedron because the opposite sides are equal and they meet at right angles. The general term “rectangular prism” is appropriate. The site has a cool section where these shapes are shown unfolded.)

Nora S. Newcombe’s article in the Summer 2010 American Educator, Picture This: Increasing Math And Science Learning By Improving Spatial Thinking, has a fascinating discussion about spatial thinking skills and how to improve spatial thinking with some simple techniques. Newcombe asks, “Since spatial thinking is associated with skill and interest in STEM fields (as well as in other areas, such as art, graphic design, and architecture), the immediate question is whether it can be improved. Can we educate children in a way that would maximize their potential in this domain?” “In addition to practicing spatial thinking tasks like those shown in the box on page 30, well-conceived symbolic representations, analogies, and gestures are also effective in improving one’s spatial thinking ability.” She describes a study that shows that parents using spatial words like outside, inside, under, over, around, and corner help preschoolers improve their spatial thinking. Although “precise answers are not yet possible,” Newcombe says, “However, we are beginning to have some good ideas about where to start, especially with preschool and elementary students.”

A young child drew and then referred to this drawing as he built...

Last week I challenged the children to first draw a ramp set-up that included at least two ramps and two blocks, and then build it. There were also sponges and plastic quart containers available. The children got to work drawing, some rushing to finish and some working more methodically. As they finished, they picked out materials and began building. Most of the 14 children referred to their drawings as they built, whether or not the structure closely matched the drawing.

....resulting in this structure.

One child announced that, “Mine’s not working!” I asked the group, What should he do?” and they responded, “Make a new plan!” He did. He went back to the table, re-drew his plan and then built a revised structure (which he was happy with) and continued working with for another 30 minutes. Two of the youngest children did not wander as they often did but spent the time engaged with building and ball-rolling. Another child had drawn a bridge-like structure with an up-ramp, level section, and a down-ramp. He tried to build it but could not get it to stay up. When I asked him what he wanted to do, he pointed to his plan indicating where he needed two supporting blocks. With a marker he drew in the supports, and then got two blocks to successfully build the revised structure.

To learn the most out of this activity, the children need time to investigate the relationship between the blocks, the slope of the ramps and the size and weight of the balls. They need time to play—did the ball make it into the hole?, time to compare—the heavy ball bumped off the path here but the light one kept going, time to think and talk about why, and time to revise their structures—“I’m going to make it better this time!” By designing, discussing their ideas, building, and revising their designs, I hope the children will gain experience with physical science concepts of force and motion while developing their spatial thinking.

Peggy

A sloth is just one of the unexpected sights in the NSTA exhibit hall!

I have to echo Mary’s post. Where else can you see robots roaming, penguins flapping, and educators making their own butterfly chrysalis necklaces? Not to mention electric hybrid cars, a sloth, and pi earrings? The exhibit hall is truly fascinating. (I’ve put more pictures from the exhibit hall up on Flikr, just search for NSTA 2011 exhibit hall.)

This is my third national conference with NSTA and the sheer number and variety of sessions still surprises me. Just a little while ago I was listening to a doctoral candidate discuss his research into equitable assessment of English language learners (ELLs). At the same time, other sessions were delving into technology issues, the use of science notebooks, maximizing the educational impact of field trips, strategies for teaching photo synthesis, and a whole lot more. Then there are the featured speakers, exhibitor workshops, and exhibits.

I’m on the verge of information overload.