Strand 2. Generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations

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Strands of Science Proficiency

• This was done through hands-on experimenting with the moon, as well as with heat and motion. One such example could be the day that we came up with our theory of how seasons work (the tilt of the earth) and then practiced walking around a light with a constant tilt.

• While we were learning about our phenomena, we evaluated the scientific evidence we had for each topic to develop powerful ideas.

• In class, students were the ones bouncing ideas off of each other; they made, observed, and reported findings and they came to conclusions (if possible) together. This information was not coming solely from the instructors.

• We started the moon unit by doing group exploration outside of class and bringing that into the classroom to use those ideas in generating powerful ideas about the moon. We all had to be productively doing those observations and then continually doing them for our sky journals in order for our learning and understanding to be successful because we could not generate explanations for what we see without having that evidence. For our moon papers to be successful, quality work we needed to be active participants in class lessons to understand all the concepts and the moon is a large part of the natural world so any information gained from that unit will be useful to us outside of the classroom as well.

• Our weekly homework assignments and moon paper demonstrated this proficiency. We needed t evaluate our data and observations to generate sufficient/quality answers.

• By having students working on these concepts they will develop and evaluate their scientific evidence that they gathered and form new explanations that can be used throughout the rest of their schooling careers. This is evident with forming an understanding of how heat is transferred or motion and forces work. Ensuring that students are able to read graphs and make predictions to what will happen when a small amount of cold water is added to a large amount of hot water, or if an object is moving towards a motion detector or away from an motion detector can teach them about forces and Newton's three laws.

• An example in the course that supports this was the first experiment that we did in class: pinhole camera phenomena. When conducting this experiment, we were all confused about our observations and had no way to explain them so we came up with our own justifications for this phenomena and eventually discovered the real reasons. After finding out this information, we were able to evaluate the scientific explanations by using the evidence in the experiment.