Ross 10/17

I've done a few student led activities in each of my classes recently.  My physical science students started on the chemistry section of their curriculum, and so they began with an inquiry that got them familiar with chemistry apparatus and procedures.  They got to demonstrate that blowing air through a straw into a beaker with universal indicator changes the color of the solution.  Each group got to hypothesize what was causing the color change, and design an experiment to test this.  By the end of the experiment, each group had pretty much come to the conclusion that carbon dioxide was causing the color change (the correct conclusion), which is pretty cool.  I'm working on getting students to think and respond more thoroughly, so we've been writing to explain thoughts, which is getting better.  Additional short writing assignments seem to be helping as well.  There are still some motivational issues with getting students to write, however. 

My chemistry students got to do something similar.  We had just been introduced to ionic compounds, so students got to set up an experiment about flame tests or solubility.  This went well, as usual for these classes, and the students wrote pretty decent conclusions. 

I plan on continuing the changes I've made so far:  setting clear expectations for deliverables, and encouraging students to think and draw conclusions.  What I'd really like to do as the semester finishes up, though, is to do a longer project.  So far, our experiments have been pretty short- one class period of gathering data at most.  I feel that I'm not getting across the idea that science is iterative.  I'm trying to come up with a project that the students will have to put more effort into, so that they can try multiple courses of data gathering and hypothesis modifying, which is much closer to real world science.  I'm also trying to intersperse some explicit content learning on the same days as project work, so that the students can see how their classroom knowledge can relate to their questions about the world.  This also helps keep student attention through long periods.