Examining Curriculum Materials: IID Taking Account of Student Ideas

Learning Goal: Benchmark 5E6-8: Food provides the fuel and the building material for all organisms. Plants use the energy from light to make sugars from carbon dioxide and water. This food can be used immediately or stored for later use.

Material: Food for Plants by Kathy Roth

Major Criterion

Indicators - What must a material do to meet the criterion?

Yes  or No

How does Food for Plants meet this indicator?

Category II: Taking Account of Student Ideas

Criterion D: Addressing commonly held ideas

Does the material attempt to address commonly held student ideas?

 

 

1. The material explicitly addresses commonly held ideas.

 

Yes 

A common misconception is that plants get their food from the soil. FFP addresses this misconception in a lesson based on Van Helmont's experiment. FFP alerts teachers to this misconception in the TG in the purpose on page 39.

2. The material includes questions, tasks, or activities that are likely to help students progress from their initial ideas, for example, by

  • explicitly challenging students' ideas, for example, by comparing their predictions about a phenomenon to what actually happens
  • prompting students to contrast commonly held ideas with the scientifically correct ideas, and resolve differences between them
  • extending correct commonly held ideas that have limited scope.

Yes 
  • Students are asked to write down and justify their ideas about whether soil is food for plants in their journals before they read about the experiment. TG p. 39.
  • Students are asked to make predictions about the outcome of Van Helmont's experiment. TG p. 40-41.
  • The TG p. 42 has teachers emphasize the contrast between students' predictions and what actually happened in the experiment.

 

3. The material includes suggestions to teachers about how to take into account their own students' ideas.

 

 

Yes 

The material provides "Expected Student Responses," which help teachers take account of their own students' ideas. For example, "Some students may ask, "Do plants poop?"….. This would be an interesting question to return to after the students have learned about the waste products of photosynthesis." TG p. 42-43.