By Julia Robins, Staff Writer
Science teachers looking for real data and hands on demonstrations have dozens of new, tested materials to choose from. On January 19, Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS) educators affiliated with Virginia Sea Grant (VASG) will invite science teachers to try out and use these resources.
The educators compiled and indexed over 70 lessons, activities, and other resources developed by nearly 40 marine scientists during one-year GK12 Fellowships, which included co-teaching middle and high school level science courses in southeastern Virginia.
“There are a lot of science teachers out there who are really hungry for classroom resources that are authentic, hands-on, and offer the students opportunities to do some inquiry of their own,” says Carol Hopper Brill, VIMS educator affiliated with VASG who co-managed five cohorts of GK12 fellows.
When Principle Investigators Dr. Kam Tang and Dr. Iris Anderson of VIMS, working with Vicki Clark—a former VIMS educator affiliated with VASG—designed the project, they targeted two major objectives: hone communication skills of graduate student scientists; and bring real marine science into the classroom. National Science Foundation funded the resulting GK12 PERFECT Fellowship from 2009-2014. PERFECT is an acronym for Partnership between Educators and Researchers for Enhancing Classroom Teaching.
“I think sometimes kids get the impression that if something’s written in a textbook, it’s just over and there’s nothing exciting about it,” says Hopper Brill.
Many of the GK12 fellows’ lesson plans get students excited about science by giving them the tools to actively work with and explore authentic data.
Matt Whalen, a former GK12 fellow and current Ph.D. student at University of California Davis, did just that. He was studying ecological interactions between sea grasses, the film of algae that grows on top of sea grass blades, and the organisms that graze the algal film clean off of the blades. Instead of pulling the grasses out and bringing them into the classroom—a messy endeavor and tough on the grasses—he used Popsicle sticks to represent sea grass blades and covered them with clay to represent the algal film. Then he had the students scrape off the clay and weigh it, just as he would scrape algal film off sea grass blades in the lab.
“The really clever thing he did was making the amounts of clay on these [Popsicle sticks] in direct proportion to his actual results,” says Hopper Brill. It gave the students the opportunity to compare their findings to his results and make and test hypotheses based on real data. More importantly, it gave the students a glimpse of what a real scientist does.
“I like that a lot of the activities are inquiry driven,” says Kevin Goff, VIMS educator affiliated with VASG. Inquiry-based learning is a process by which students learn to tackle a central question through independent investigation. “I think what is really ingenious about a lot of these lessons is that the fellows figured out ways to create virtual field studies or experiments. Fellows not only shared their original data, but modeled how they designed experiments and analyzed results—then gave the students a chance to mimic their authentic scientific process.”
Maybe the most impressive feature is that all of the lessons have been tested and evaluated in real, and sometimes multiple, classrooms. “You can tell that a lot of ocean science lesson plans out there haven’t been classroom tested,” says Goff. “It’s out there, but it’s a lot of work to go get it, and teachers don’t necessarily know how or have the time. They really depend on folks like us to find something that’s workable for the classroom.”
To distribute these resources, Hopper Brill and Goff compiled lesson plans along with profile information about grade levels and subject areas onto more than 250 USB drives. So far the team has distributed the resources at National Science Teacher Association and Virginia Science Teacher Association events. Hopper Brill says the response has been “overwhelmingly positive.”
