Examining Curriculum Materials: Food For Plants

Examining Curriculum Materials: VB: Guiding Interpretation & Reasoning

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.

Name of 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 V: Promoting Student Thinking about Phenomena, Experiences, and Knowledge Criterion B: Guiding student interpretation and reasoning Does the material include tasks and/or question sequences to guide student interpretation and reasoning about experiences with phenomena, representations, and ideas?	1. The material includes specific and relevant tasks and/or questions for the experience or reading.	Yes	Food for Plants presents Van Helmont’s experiment, which provides evidencethat plants do not use food from the soil to support their growth. It then provides a series of tasks to guide student thinking about the experiment. SB p. 37-41.
	2. The questions or tasks have helpful characteristics such as framing important issues helping students to relate their experiences with phenomena or representations to presented scientific ideas helping students to make connections between their own ideas and the phenomena or representations observed helping students to make connections between their own ideas and the presented scientific ideas anticipating common student misconceptions focusing on contrasts between student misconceptions and scientific alternatives.	Yes	Tasks interpret Van Helmont's experiment in terms of conservation of matter SB p. 37-38. Students link Van Helmont's experiment to their own ideas by writing down & justifying their ideas about soil as food TG p. 41 and predicting outcome of Van Helmont's experiment. SB p. 39 After learning about Van Helmont's experiment, students are encouraged to think whether soil is food for plants and explain answers SB p. 40. Teachers are instructed to emphasize the contrast between student's predictions and what actually happened. TG p.42. Teachers materials include expected students questions and suggestions for dealing with student answers. TG p. 42-43.
	3. There are scaffolded sequences of questions or tasks (as opposed to separate questions or tasks).	Yes	The material provides a carefully selected and sequenced series of questions to guide student interpretation and reasoning about the reasoning.