Students put their knowledge to work: every student must take a stand on whether to serve genetically modified potatoes in their school cafeteria – and to give evidence for their reasoning.
Once the students understand the biology of genetically modified organisms, the teacher helps students deepen their learning by assigning further reading and asking students to imagine possible applications of GMO technology.
Common classroom experiences anchor discussions and level the playing field for all students. Setting the stage for discussion includes a review of relevant investigations or activities.
A brief overview of teacher tools that promote student discourse in the classroom. A summary of why spend your time on talk in the science classroom and its functions.
A table of different verbal and non-verbal tools that help students participate in science discourse. Contains examples of productive talk moves.
Every Learning Experience in Foundation Science Begins with a brainstorming activity. This six minute video explains how brainstorming can be used to determine prior knowledge of your students, introduce new content, and establish a safe classroom culture for sharing ideas.
In this short text, the power of formative assessment as a teaching tool is detailed, and examples of opportunities for formative assessment within Foundation Science Biology proposed, for Learning Experiences (LE) 2, 3 and 4.
This short text provides a description of different ways in which the curriculum can be modified to meet the needs of teachers and students while still retaining the intentions of the developers. Examples of possible modifications are provided.
This short text provides a description of different ways in which the curriculum can be modified to meet the needs of teachers and students while still retaining the intentions of the developers. Examples of possible modifications are provided.
This short text explains the reasoning for the sequencing of the content in Foundation Science: Biology. Specifically, it describes the content sequence for the full year curriculum, for the Genetics Unit, for a Learning Experience, and provides examples.
Research in student knowledge and learning of science has typically focused on explaining conceptual change. Recent research, however, documents the great degree to which student thinking is dynamic and context-sensitive, implicitly calling for explanations not only of change but also of stability. In other words, when a pattern of student reasoning is sustained in specific moments and settings, what mechanisms contribute to sustaining it? We characterize student understanding and behavior in terms of multiple local coherences in that they may be variable yet still exhibit local stabilities. We attribute stability in local conceptual coherences to real-time activities that sustain these coherences. For example, particular conceptual understandings may be stabilized by the linguistic features of a worksheet question or by feedback from the students’ spatial arrangement and orientation. We document a group of university students who engage in multiple local conceptual coherences while thinking about motion during a collaborative learning activity. As the students shift their thinking several times, we describe mechanisms that may contribute to local stability of their reasoning and behavior.
