School's for learning stuff!

We're slowly inching closer to the term break and I know a lot of classes have been busy doing science. In the past we have focused on assessing literacy and mathematics but science is usually left to participating in a 'topic' comment!

NZCER assessment tool. The Y7-10 one is a printed test whilst the Y4-6 is online

I guess the big question is "Why assess in science?" and one that you could pursue further with your syndicate or school... What is the point of assessing what students have been doing in science? There must be some very good reasons, otherwise we wouldn't have the NZCER Science Thinking With Evidence assessment tool for Y4s and up...
 If we're thinking about improving student achievement, and our focus is on the Nature of Science or the science capabilities,  there's plenty to assess! How well do students notice? Or build explanations? Or critique one another's experiments and results? Or how do they read diagrams and charts or create graphs showing their experiment's results?
It may be that you set up a rubric or assessment tool, or the students co-construct it with you. If several teams are taking science, perhaps you could all get together and think about what you would like to see at each level. By assessing across the different levels, the school can start building a picture of what's happening in the school, perhaps supporting some teachers in teaching science more specifically or encouraging more focused science... We notice the children aren't sure about some of the verbs like 'analyse', 'critique' or 'explain' so we're going to give students opportunities in reading to explore science articles as well as give them experiments and other opportunities to develop their understanding of these verbs... When the children draw diagrams, they're pretty haphazard about it. I've got together with the Y3/4 teacher and the Y7/8 teacher and we've sort of mapped out what we could expect at each level. We're aware it's in the English curriculum too so we're looking at Visual Language at the same time. We're going to also spend some time analysing diagrams to look at the features and purposes behind diagrams as well as their strengths and weaknesses, critiquing more at the senior levels. 
I spent a few minutes googling, and there are plenty of websites highlighting poor diagrams, like https://www.businessinsider.com.au/the-27-worst-charts-of-all-time-2013-6?r=US&IR=T#did-anyone-learn-anything-by-looking-at-this-pseudo-pie-chart-what-do-these-colors-even-mean-why-is-it-divided-into-quadrants-well-never-know-1.

broadsheet.ie... Don't really to listen to Eminem but I like these words.

From Pinterest... and I like the Beatles!

If you can work with other levels, we can share out the learning -it's not up to the Year 3 teacher to teach all there is to know about diagrams! If it's a particular topic, for example gardening, what would we like juniors to learn as opposed to those in the middle school or the seniors? Do we just want to repeat the same information? Could we look at gardening in different scenarios or environments? Could we build on what children are learning at each level, becoming more specific in vocabulary, more definite in what students are learning?
You can see I'm not really thinking about nuts and bolts assessments specifically... Paul can identify in three ways. Paul critiques using ... words. Paul can write up an experiment. I'm thinking about ways that can enhance my teaching, perhaps even develop my pedagogy more, than thinking about what the children may or may not know! And I'm nowhere near Paul knows what annular momentum is (actually that should probably say Paul is slowly getting the idea of what annular momentum is!) or Paul can identify five molluscs, knows the phylus and genus, and makes a fantastic shrimp cocktail. If I'm thinking about these deeper thinking skills, and I'm assessing more for me as a teacher (although I'd like a comment for student reports) I might be thinking about those skills that I use as an adult too... which is what the nature of science and the science capabilities are all about!
If the students have carried out more of a literacy research project for science, what ideas from this can I assess or evaluate for the science units next term? The Y7/8 children wrote lots of expressive words like 'cute' or 'ugly as'. With our next science unit, I want to focus on students using scientific language as well as thinking about what science may look like as a writing genre. This will mean reading some articles and highlighting the language used (and the language articles don't use!). They also got a lot of information from wikipedia and I want them to learn that we need to use New Zealand websites amd why as well. If students have been busy learning about beach animals or sea creatures, what did I notice they had trouble with? My Year 2s learnt some of the names of creatures but didn't really get the te reo names. I also want to build a wider and deeper word bank with them as their descriptions were very simple and didn't get past 'a nice shell' or 'orange starfish'. Next term I'm going to work on size, shape and colour as well as using all the senses in a structured way. I'll also give them more words to work with.
I have talked about assessment before, check out http://sciencehappeningnz.blogspot.co.nz/2017/06/gathering-evidence-or-prove-it-then.html (June, 2017) for some ideas. As always, happy to chat with anyone!

Keep sciencing on...

Oh and a new feature!
Cool Websites
A teacher from Opotiki showed me this website: https://what-if.xkcd.com/ It has some interesting ideas plus some humour that particularly the older students will enjoy AND could be neat for a shared reading lesson (or perhaps trying out the experiment, depending on what it is!) .

So what is science?

A quick note at the top! I think this blog subject could be an interesting one for a staff or syndicate meeting, one for teachers to discuss and grow their own understanding of what science might mean.

Last week, as I went for my evening walk I came across a couple of people putting out a net. They were quite focused about it and the net was held up by blown up milk bottles. They were busy untangling the net and checking for holes:

Photo by me!

The question I found myself asking was Is this science? I asked a few teachers as well through the week to see what they thought. It reminded me of a conversation I had with a teacher a while ago where they were adamant that turning on a light was "science". It challenged me to think a bit more about what I thought!

This is just my opinion and I really welcome your thinking and questions being shared too. To me, I like to think about how there are many different disciplines in science, for example, marine biology, astronomy, medicine, horticulture, zoology, etc but why are they all called "sciences"? What ties them all together to be science and not art or history? For me, it's what's behind each discipline. Scientists, regardless of the subject, could be observing, asking questions, posing hypotheses, discussing results, critiquing one another, etc. I don't want to add too many as I think it could be an interesting question to ask fellow teachers or even the children.

For me, this is what science is all about! Of course it's about the big issues and sustainability, etc but behind these are the attitudes, processes and skills, or 'the Nature of Science'. I tend to work with schools around the science capabilities and they reflect this nature of science too. This is the stuff we can support students to develop regardless of the context, the bits we could assess to see how students are growing. The NZCER Science Thinking with Evidence explore student understanding of these, rather than how well they know the solar system or the biology of the daisy. 

We do need these rich contexts, issues that affect students and their communities, questions we would like to answer (which may not be big issues but as simple as how come magnets stick to some things but not others? which as I write, I think this could be quite deep!) or simply a that's strange... There's a neat Dr Suess quote I saw on twitter the other day: It's better to know how than to know which I think could reflect my thinking here... Better to know the how to do science than the science itself...

Yes, the above picture could have used science in terms of where the net is places, the material of the net, how many milk bottles, etc but to my thinking, simply going fishing isn't science! And yes, you can disagree with me!

Goose-neck barnacles

I saw these on the same walk earlier and later thought about the difference with the way I was acting to the fisherfolk... I observed closely, noted that the shellfish were all in the same horizontal areas of the log which caused me to wonder if the log had been floating a particular way. All the barnacles were very dried up and dead so I thought about how long it had been out of the beach as well as how long it might have been at sea for this many barnacles to be living on the log. I noticed there were many different sizes of shell, the way the shell was designed (in five parts!) how it connected, etc. I had lots of questions so when I got back, I looked them up on the internet to see if I could find some answers. In my thinking, this is science! 

So what do you think? What do your children think? Of course, we could go deeper... did Monet use 'science' to paint?, or a person designing a guitar?, or Roald Dahl in writing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

Keep sciencing on!