HS Physics Parachute 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.
Image by Motokoka
So imagine that you have a great data-based lesson from Data Classroom on Coffee Filter Parachute Lab: Part 2 for your learners to work on concepts related to HS-PS2-1. Your students are comfortable using Data Classroom and the lesson has gone well in the past.
However, based on your students performance in the last unit you are looking to give them more time to “Visualize Data” and “Describe & Analyze Patterns” in a practiced way (see Building Blocks for Data Literacy to explore the corresponding data skills of these areas more).
ou are torn, you like the Data Classroom lesson 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 optional tweaks/additions to make the lesson more what you need now.
Black text is part of the original lesson (which directs students to make a scatterplot) and the blue text are suggested additional question to add before giving them the instructions for what graph to make. A full copy of the revised lesson can be viewed here.
Here is an example of how we can add a question to the lesson to more directly help your current students practice graph choice, a data skill you know they are weaker on (or you are more interested in targeting in this specific data interaction) currently.
Black text is part of the original lesson and the blue text are suggested additional questions. A full copy of the revised lesson can be viewed here.
Here is an example of how we can add questions that more specifically get at describing the observed patterns (beyond the intercepts) and considering various aspects of the pattern (e.g., variability in data, causality vs correlation) which are critical first steps before determining what it could mean with respect to the physics concepts of the lesson.
These questions should not add a large amount to the workload of the students, but they do provide more targeted practice of these skills. And you certainly wouldn’t need to add all of these new questions but rather the ones that best target the skills you want your students to practice.
Therefore, with the addition of some new questions, you can now use a tried-and-true lesson of your curriculum while also better aligning it to your 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!
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.
