Project CUES - Instructional Design

Project CUES Instructional Design at the Unit Level

• Unit Introduction (1-2 days)

The unit introduction will engage and motivate students to learn Earth science and assess their initial understandings of core content and inquiry.
• Guided Inquiry (4 -5 weeks) 

The guided inquiry phase will help students explore Earth science phenomena and improve their understandings of concepts, inquiry, and nature of science in order to prepare them for extended inquiry. Students explore related key concepts in "vignettes" that require 1-2 weeks to complete.
• Mid-unit Assessment (1-2 days) 

The mid-unit assessment will require students to demonstrate and explain their understanding of core concepts and provide an opportunity for teachers to review difficult concepts.
• Extended, Student-driven Inquiry (2-3 weeks) 

The extended inquiry phase will allow students to elaborate upon what they have learned. It begins with a planning conference in which students select problems of local or regional importance and propose 1-2 student-designed investigations. 
• Research Conference (1-2 days)

After completion of the investigations students will seek consensus on concepts, and student-driven inquiry will culminate in a presentation or publication of their research.

Video, graphics, and narratives within the CUES text and in opening video sequences will provide highly engaging examples of phenomena. The Geosphere unit might begin with first-hand accounts of a woman who saw a fault scarp form in an Idaho Earthquake, a father’s struggle to hold up a refrigerator that toppled on his toddler son, or a scientist who survived the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Video footage might show a hurricane storm surge, storm-induced beach erosion, or a house in California collapsing in a mudslide. Questions will then prompt students to explain their ideas (What happened? What caused the event? Can the hazard be predicted – why or why not? What hazard is most likely to affect our community? How can the hazard be studied?). Students begin their Research Journal by posing questions and identifying possible hazards of local concern. 

Assessment of introducing phenomena will focus on uncovering students’ current beliefs. Teachers will review responses to the open-ended questions at the start of the unit. The teacher guide will provide examples of likely student responses and explain how activities in the unit address student preconceptions. The teacher guide will also provide an easily scored multiple-choice pre-assessment “survey” aligned to major learning goals for the unit. When appropriate, teachers will add items to the survey that align with state/local standards. In this unit, the research journal and pre-assessment provide baseline data on student conceptions about the causes and effects of natural processes and understanding of the nature of science. 

For the next four to five weeks, students will work in collaborative groups to explore Earth systems concepts by completing about 10-12 brief, focused guided-inquiry investigations. Many activities can be drawn from AGI’s newest program, Investigating Earth System (IES), a program that uses guided inquiry and open-ended inquiry methods. IES inquiry activities follow a learning cycle model in which explanation follows exploration of concepts. About two-thirds of the 67 proven and tested inquiry activities in IES align with the more comprehensive scope and sequence of CUES. For the Geosphere Unit of CUES, IES Investigating Dynamic Planet, and Investigating Climate and Weather provide inquiry activities that focus on core concepts related to the causes and effects of natural hazards. Project staff will develop additional activities for CUES guided inquiry and will augment the Earth system science emphasis within existing IES activities. 

One of the most innovative aspect of CUES will be how it provides students with further explanations of science concepts, processes, and the nature of science and scientific inquiry. Project staff will oversee the writing of approximately 100 narratives describing and illustrating science inquiry by practicing Earth scientists and Earth system scientists. The 25 narratives for each unit, each about three or four pages long, will be incorporated into the CUES text at the end of relevant guided inquiry. Narratives will follow a format similar to that used to describe science inquiry in the first chapter of Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards: A Guide for Teaching and Learning (NRC, 2000, p. 1-6), which describes a geologists’ inquiry into a stand of dead trees in coastal Washington. Text in the margins of the narratives (as used in the NRC publication and in the teacher guides of IES modules) will point out important aspects of inquiry, such as Makes observations, Considers new evidence, Defines questions from knowledge background and so on. Text passages will be written in the learning cycle format (examples, patterns, and relationships before terminology), a method shown to increase comprehension for readers at all reasoning levels compared to traditional text (Musheno and Lawson, 1999). 

Video is a key tool for Earth science education at the middle school level because much of the content pertains to real world events that cannot be observed first-hand by teachers or students. Earth systems are complex and involve both dramatic and slowly evolving global events and processes, few of which happen where middle school students can observe them. For example, the events that students will explore in the Geosphere unit (e.g., Earthquakes, volcanoes, tidal waves, hurricanes, and tornadoes) are rarely available for direct observation by students due to location, time of occurrence, and danger. Video alone has the unique ability to bring such events into the classroom in a dramatic and immediate way. Recognizing this value, many secondary school curriculum projects successfully incorporate a video component including Foundations and Challenges to Encourage Technology (FACETS), Chemistry in the Community (ChemCom), Event-based Science, FOSS, and Active Physics. Video is a familiar and successful technology that all schools possess.

Appropriate data sets, photos, satellite images, and visualizations will be used to support guided inquiry in CUES. When appropriate and accessible, visualizations and footage of natural events will be incorporated into the content video for the unit, such as visualizations of plate motions or time-lapse sequences of Earthquake events.
  Guided inquiry in CUES will help students develop the conceptual understanding needed to pose meaningful research questions for extended inquiry. While completing guided inquiry and reading the text in the Geosphere unit, students will 1) identify hazards of concern in their region 2) use the science they have learned to explain and justify their answers, and 3) raise additional questions for pursuit in extended inquiry. Focused journal questions will guide students’ reflections on their activities and how the activities relate to nature of science and scientific inquiry. This helps help students consider how “what” they are doing relates to the nature of science or scientific inquiry. Focused journal questions are a part of the emphasized explicit/reflective approach to teaching.

Assessment of guided inquiry will be regular and formative. It will include daily observations of student inquiry and collaboration, and review of inquiry reports and reflections within the research journal, a tool that students will use to demonstrate their evolving understanding of core concepts and inquiry processes as they complete and reflect upon guided inquiry. 

Student-driven inquiry should be informed by understanding (NRC, 1996). Thus, the assessment will measure understandings and inquiry skills that students need to conduct extended inquiry. Preparing for the assessment, students will review their research journals to synthesize ideas gleaned from guided inquiry. The teacher will review core concepts and inquiry processes and give a mid-unit exam (objective and constructed response items) to assess students’ understanding of core concepts and abilities targeted in the unit. The teacher will score and review the exam with students, provide further explanation, and allow students to proceed to the next stage after demonstrating proficiency. 

Classroom inquiry in its highest level requires students to formulate their own researchable question, design, and conduct a two to three week period of investigation. Students will draw conclusions to inform their question. High level, classroom-based inquiry engages students in:
 
• Developing researchable questions that are relevant for learning targeted science concepts.
• Pursuing questions and problems that have personal relevance (so as to increase the likelihood that students will assume ownership of their investigations). 
• Considering methods of investigating their questions; carrying out investigations; and modifying procedures and redoing investigations until able to come to some conclusions. A conclusion may be a reasonable answer to their question or the recognition that they need to do more investigating before drawing conclusions. In doing so, students need to consider what data are relevant and available, and how much data is “enough.” 
• Analyzing and interpreting their data in light of their investigative purpose. They should decide what constitutes valid evidence and also recognize the limitations of their methods. 
• Consulting current scientific concepts when formulating their investigations and when constructing conclusions. 
• Investigations that lead to more questions for further study. 


In the extended inquiry phase of a CUES unit, students will focus on problems relevant to their lives and community. It will give students the opportunity to elaborate upon what they have learned. 

Extended inquiry begins with a planning conference, the goal of which is for the class to pool their collective wisdom about issues related to the natural hazards of greatest local or regional significance. Students in Oklahoma might develop questions about the mitigation of tornado hazards, whereas students in the pacific northwest might choose to focus on volcanic hazards. Working in collaborative groups, students will draw upon the understanding of concepts that they developed in the first half of the unit, available information sources (text narratives, CD-ROM, Web, local experts), and upon local resources that the teacher has gathered by consulting the teacher guide and CUES web site. Templates and criteria provided in the textbook will help students to form research questions, establish research teams (2-6 students), and develop a research proposal for extended inquiry. The research proposal will serve as a contract between teacher and the research team. Upon approval of the research proposal, students will conduct one or two investigations with a local or regional emphasis. Students will document their research plans, investigations, data analyses, and results in their research journal.

The extended inquiry phase of each CUES unit will help teachers include more higher-level inquiry investigations wherein they address important Earth science concepts as well as aspects of the nature of science and scientific inquiry through explicit/reflective methods. Explicit is used here to emphasize that teaching these concepts should be treated in a manner similar to teaching about any other cognitive learning outcome. The reflective aspect involves the application of these tactics in the context of the Earth science activities, investigations, and historical examples used in the daily science instruction. The CUES teachers' guide will include descriptions and suggested methods of facilitating discussion, questions, and guided written/oral reflection that targets specific nature of science and scientific inquiry that are relevant to the Earth science content. Student text will include descriptions of how the Earth science content and activities relate to science and the activities of scientists. 

• The final days of a CUES unit offer an opportunity to evaluate the extent to which students attained the intended learning outcomes and for them to share their work beyond the classroom. They will summarize, publish, and prepare research results in the classroom, the community, or via the Web and seek consensus on core concepts and processes. The conference serves as a student-led review of core concepts and inquiry processes in preparation for a unit exam. The unit exam will be derived from unit goals and can be compared to pre-assessment results to demonstrate student gains.