7th Grade Allele Probabilities Activity - Tweaked ;)
This article is part of the “LP Tweaks Tuesday” blog series of showcasing how small adjustments to the questions, organization, and/or data moves within your existing curriculum can help align the learning to different data skills for your learners. This original lesson is strong, and the intention is not to communicate otherwise but rather to share how you could adjust things for a different desired outcome.
Same litter, different color patterns…genetics in action :)
So imagine that you have a great data-based lesson from Lab Aids on looking at the probabilities of different alleles being inherited from offspring (*note this activity requires payment for the curriculum) for your learners to work on concepts related to MS-LS1-5. Your students have been using Lab Aids for the entire year and like the hands-on aspects of the activities.
However, based on your students performance in the last unit you are looking to give them more time to “Articulate Uncertainty” in a practiced way to more deeply get at their data analysis and interpretation skills (see Building Blocks for Data Literacy to explore the corresponding data skills of these areas more).
You are torn, you like the Lab Aids lesson and all your other colleagues are using it, but you are worried the questions aren’t directly getting at the data skills your learners need to practice at this point in the year, but the content is. What do you do?
Let’s check out some easy optional tweaks to make the lesson more what you are looking for now.
Black and blue text is part of the original lesson and the red text are suggested additional questions to add. A full copy of the revised lesson can be viewed here.
Here is an example of how we can add a few questions to the lesson to more directly help your current students practice data skills we know they are weaker on (or we are more interested in targeting in this specific data interaction) at this point in the year.
The questions are designed to help students to “refer to uncertainty when reasoning about data” in grade 7 appropriate ways. They do not add a large amount to the workload of the students, but they do provide more targeted practice of these skills. These additional questions help students to see that these data, like all data, are from a sample. And that a key part of working with data is thinking about probabilities and predictions from the data.
Even though the students have numbers, these questions are designed specifically to them conceptually think about the data and conclusions from the data (aka what is relevant to the science topic) as opposed to getting lost in the mathematical calculations.
Therefore, with the addition of 2 new questions, you can continue to use the tried-and-true lesson from your curriculum while also better aligning it to your current learners needs and/or your desired focus areas for your learners to practice data skills.
To me that feels like a win-win…using a lesson that you like with a more strategic data focus to help learners build their skills :)
Will this exact tweak work for everyone or every lesson? Absolutely not!
In fact, the other suggested adjustments in this lesson would help students that are needing to work on their “Visualize Data” skills at this time of the year. So rather than just collecting data in the table, students could also visualize their data (with a dataset like this one).
The point is that with a better sense of what we are working towards with data skills (see Building Blocks for Data Literacy to explore the range of data skills K-12 our learners should be working to master) we can be empowered to make our existing curriculum work better for us and our learners. Rather than needing to find new curriculum.
Give it a try! What in your next lesson with data can you slightly adjust to make it better hit the skills you want your students to practice? Let us know how it goes.
