From Dr. Carol Stuessy S Inquiry Class, Spring, 2008

1

Weather and Climate

Chapter 9

From Dr. Carol Stuessy’s Inquiry Class, Spring, 2008

Grades 6-8 Immersion Unit:

Understanding the Electromagnetic Spectrum

and the Effects of Declination on Earth Systems.

Robert Wilson, Julie Singleton, Victoria Hollas,

Julia Van Buskirk, and Carol Stuessy

Central Themes

1. Light and other electromagnetic waves can warm objects. How much an object’s temperature increases depends on intensity and duration.
2. The temperature of a place on the earth’s surface tends to rise and fall in a somewhat predictable pattern. The pattern of temperature changes observed in a place tend to vary depending on geographic location and declination. (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2007).

Introduction

The students in this immersion unit will be exposed to two connections from the Atlas for Science Literacy, Volume II (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2007). The first connection links prior knowledge from a previous immersion unit to skills that the student is expected to master at the sixth through eighth grade level which focuses on light and other electromagnetic waves. This immersion unit should follow a lesson on heat transfer, conduction, convection and radiation. Electromagnetic waves can warm objects. Students will learn how much an object’s temperature increases depending on the intensity and duration of the electromagnetic radiation. The second connection will lay the foundation for skills that will be needed at the terminal, or high school, level. This connection focuses on the temperature of a particular place on the earth’s surface and how that temperature tends to rise and fall in a somewhat predictable pattern. The pattern of temperature change observed in a place tends to vary depending on geographic location and the Earth’s declination. Through these two connections, novice science teachers will have a better understanding of how to implement a specific immersion unit for their own students.

Overview

Sequencing of phases during instruction

The learning activities within this immersion unit have been separated into different phases. The four phases represent the separate steps of instruction that teacher and students will navigate during this educational experience.

Phase A: General Staging Activitiessintroduces the students to the foundational concepts of the electromagnetic spectrum by using a webquest from the University of Colorado called Physics 2000.( See ). This innovative website is aimed at all ages and emphasizes imagery and interactivity. In this webquest/simulation, students will gain basic knowledge about electromagnetic radiation, types of electromagnetic radiation, frequency, speed of light and common uses of electromagnetic radiation. This entire immersion unit will be supplemented by several online activities such as Physics 2000 and The Global Sun Temperature Project that will solidify the students’ understanding of essential concepts and facilitate student learning by making connections to the idea that electromagnetic waves can warm objects.

Phase B: Background Activities provides the learner with multiple opportunities to describe and predict using an online lesson called The Global Sun Temperature Project. In this online experience, much like in Project Globe, the student will have access to data sets from around the world. The student researcher will have daily opportunities to incorporate their information into the project’s more complicated data set. The Global Sun Temperature Project has four activities as the foundation for the online educational experience. Each one of these activities will teach students how to communicate the knowledge and thinking skills of technology, math, and science to the global community involved in this project. Specifically, students will determine their latitude and longitude coordinates to determine where on the earth they are located. The students involved will measure and record temperature and minutes of daylight from their location using several different methods. Students will calculate averages, plot and analyze data, and draw conclusions based on raw data gathered from other schools involved in the project. This activity will provide the student researcher an opportunity to present their data collection to a wide and varied audience with opportunities for interdisciplinary connections by interacting with other students from around the world and study their unique attributes like geographic location, environment, and culture.

During Phase C: Inquiry Experience, students will participate as a science research team in an authentic inquiry experience. Students will design an experiment that uses different electromagnetic waves to warm different types of surfaces that model conditions on the earth. Students will generate their own research questions, design experiments, collect and organize data and draw conclusions. The teacher’s role is more of facilitator and a resource manager as students make choices about what they would like to discover within the system of variables that I have provided. Procedures and outcomes are passed over to the students and they take ownership of their learning through this inquiry experience. The students’ may quickly answer their first research question, but these initial experiments often generate new questions. Students will be given time to follow their thoughts. Some groups may experience difficulties and may have to redesign their research plans. The lessons of trial and error are hard fought, but can offer a deeper, more memorable learning experience. Student research teams will have four days to experiment and then a day to prepare their presentations. This should be flexible based on students needs. After students have had a chance to work with the system of variables, I will give them a consequential task that involves designing a habitat on Mars that will apply what they have learned about electromagnetic radiation from the sun and its ability to affect the Earth’s surface to a different environment.

Student research teams will then have an opportunity to present their work to the class for peer review and revision before they turn in their final research reports during Phase D: Presenting Findings. Students will follow a specific critique format that will allow for positive feedback and specific ways to improve their work. Table 9.1 below provides a snapshot of each phase and its description.

Table 9.1 Examination of Phases within the 6-8 Immersion Unit

Phase Name (Duration) / Descriptions Including Assessment of Student Learning
Phase A: General Staging Activities
(3 days) / Using a webquest called Physics 2000 the students will learn the properties of electromagnetic waves and how these waves can warm a surface.
Phase B: Background Activities
(8 days. Ongoing data collection throughout the unit) / The student researcher will have opportunities to incorporate their data collected into a more complex data set that will be written into a report that will be submitted online.
Assessment: Student’s data measurements, calculations, and contribution to the final report.
Phase C: Inquiry Experience
(10 days) / Students will generate research questions, design experiments, collect and display data as they create models that help them interpret the relationship between electromagnetic energy from the sun and conditions on the Earth’s surface. The consequential task will involve the design of a habitat on Mars that will maximize radiation from the sun.
Assessment: Consequential Task
Phase D: Presenting Findings
(3 days) / Students will present their experiments to the class for peer critique and revision before turning in research reports.
Assessment: Participation in peer review and Research Reports.

Through the use of different types of inquiry, students become fluent in the literacy of science. This scientific literacy is a process that is ultimately guided by the style of inquiry the teacher implements. Teaching inquiry for inquiry’s sake might have a negative effect on the student, while teaching inquiry as a process in taking the student learner through the progression of the strands of scientific proficiency should enhance the educational experience. In the following section, the strands of scientific proficiency are related to the immersion units presented in this chapter.

Strands of Scientific Proficiency

The educational scaffolding found in this immersion unit was developed using the four strands of scientific proficiency as outlined in Taking Science to School (National Research Council, 2007). Connections to each strand are found throughout the inquiry experience for middle school learners. Those connections are singled out in each strand that follows for clarification.

Strand 1: Know, Use, and Interpret Scientific Explanations of the Natural World

Strand One connections occur in both inquiry experiences through the exploration of the properties of electromagnetic waves and the discovery of where they occur in nature in Phase A: General Staging Activities. Strand one connections are found in how the students acquire the construct of declination and applies that information to The Global Sun Temperature Project in Phase B: Background Activities.

Strand 2: Generate and Evaluate Scientific Evidence and Explanations

The learner will generate a data set that will be part of The Global Sun Temperature Project which will be included in a larger data set that is generated by schools from around the world. Through this combining of data sets, the student researcher will be able to build and refine models based on a larger data set. During Phase C: Inquiry Experience, students will generate data which they will interpret in their conclusions. They will then be able to empirically defend the conclusions that they present.

Strand 3: Understand the Nature and Development of Scientific Knowledge

Misconceptions abound in the understanding of something as simple as what causes the seasons on Earth. This common misconception will be addressed in Phase B: Background Activities as students associate temperature and length of day to proximity to the equator. Questions also arise about the sun and its effect on climate. Strand three inquiry explorations are designed to guide the student researcher in a process that expands on the traditional scientific method. Students who progress to this stage are able to see that there might be limits to their scientific knowledge and are able to assimilate new knowledge into their own cognitive processes.

Strand 4: Participate Productively in Scientific Practices and Discourse

The student researcher will be able to join in scientific discourse as they begin to develop their own scientific knowledge. By conducting informal discussions with each other, members in different groups, and members of different schools around the world during theThe Global Sun Project, students will practice engaging in scientific discourse that will enrich the learning through the scientific community in which they reside. Though this process, the student can defend the previous position, or move their knowledge in a direction which represents a new opinion. As student research teams present their research from the inquiry experience in Phase C the class will evaluate each teams’ work and provide feedback for improvement.

Phase A: General Staging Activities

Students participating in the first part of this inquiry unit will use the webquest from the University of Colorado to reaffirm the scientific foundation that each student brings to the classroom. The lesson takes the learner through a series of questions and online simulations where the student will go through a step by step process of learning about electromagnetic waves.

Materials

• computer
• digital thermometer (probeware)

Day 1 – 3:

The first day of instruction is a direct instructional day. Some students might not have experience in using a computer in the setting that will be asked of them, although they will profess to be Internet experts. The teacher will have the students sit down at their own computer workstation while the teacher has the same web page running on the digital projector in the classroom. The teacher will then manipulate the Java programs to show the logistics of working the web-based program. Some students might be more interested in manipulating the program than learning the lesson behind it. This will be a perfect opportunity for the teacher to take on the role of student. In this role reversal, the students will enjoy guiding the teacher through the simulation process due to their possible self-professed expertise in computer simulations. Having student actively engaged in this direct instruction process will enhance their experience in the days and weeks that follow. In essence, by feeling as if they have more knowledge than the teacher, the student will gain the skills necessary for the unit. Before the students can work effectively during the rest of this immersion unit, they first must understand the complexities of electromagnetic waves. To do this, the students will complete Physics 2000(see link above).

The lesson begins with the teacher asking the students to discuss in small groups what they know about the electromagnetic spectrum. When the overall discussion begins to die down, the students will start exploring electromagnetic waves through the use of Java simulations. See Figure 9.1 below. Some key questions of this exploration are

• What are electromagnetic waves?
• What are the electromagnetic waves made of?
• What are electrons and protons?

The student will be able to manipulate a wavelength simulation that shows some of the common types of technology that use wavelengths at different frequencies. The scale runs from radio waves that show a measured wavelength of 24 meters to gamma radiation with a measured wavelength of 0.00000000001 meters.

Figure 9.1. Example From the Physics 2000 Website

The lesson continues across several web pages that challenge the student to apply previous gained knowledge to what they are currently learning about electromagnetic waves. After the students go through the series of online manipulations, they will have a better understanding of the how electromagnetic waves function and the role they play in everyday life. With this foundation, the student will be prepared to discover how electromagnetic radiation can heat objects. In this case, the student will specifically look at visible light and infrared radiation and how it reacts with an experiment that is designed by a team of students.

Authors’ Insights:

The Physics 2000 website provided by the University of Colorado is an educational initiative to make physics accessible to students of all ages. This project, once sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was created in 2000; however, this webpage is still a good resource despite its somewhat dated webpage graphics and flow. These limitations need to be taken into consideration when guiding the students through the website for the first time. The student receives information in units of the "page" and the "screen." Instructions should be broken down into a sequence that keeps the student learner engaged. Figure 9.2 shows the levels of difficulty associated with the interactive lessons from the Physics 2000 website.

Figure 9.2Physics 2000 Difficulty Levels

Phase B: Background Activities

Materials

• Computers with Internet access
• Thermometer
• Notebooks and Pencils
• Daily Newspaper to locate sunrise / sunset times
• Final "Verified" Data reported from all the participating schools
• Graph paper or Spreadsheet Program (i.e. Excel) Student Worksheets, graphs, files, etc.

Days 4 – 12: (Daily data collection will overlap with Phase C)

During this activity, the students will discover temperature variations and the declination of the Earth on its axis. This experience will cover an online lesson called The Global Sun Temperature Project. The Global Sun Temperature Project has four foundational activities that will enable the student researcher to experience and apply the knowledge and thinking skills of mathematics, science, and technology to explain real-world situations. These activities will teach students how to communicate the knowledge and thinking skills of technology, math, and science to the global community involved in this project. The student researcher will have the opportunity to gather detailed data. Some of what they will gather includes determining the latitude and longitude coordinates of their school, measure and recording temperature and minutes of daylight, calculating the daily averages of these, and plotting and analyzing this data using computer programs. Also, the idea of declination (i.e., the tilt of the Earth), will be presented in this unit through several avenues. The participants will draw conclusions based on raw data from the Internet and communicate their results. Students will also have the opportunity to interact with other students from around the world who are studying the same things and expand their data set to include those geographic locations, environments, and cultures. The Global Sun Temperature Project website is: as detailed in Figure 9.3. Here the student will have a HTML based webpage that they will be able to use to upload their local school data to the main project as detailed in Figure 9.4.

Figure 9.3 The Sun Times Website

Figure 9.4 The Global Sun Temperature Project Sample Data Set