Inquiry Work Samples – Circuits and Pathways1
What is a work sample?
What does an inquiry work sample look like?
• Work sample is essentially a lab report written by the student to show what he/she did and what he/she learned from that experience.
• Lab work
- may be done in class as part of a team experiment
- may be based on experiment which is in a module
- should provide student or group of students an opportunity to develop and investigate their own hypothesis or question
- should provide students an opportunity to modify or extend a procedure they have already used, or to invent a new procedure
• Written report
- must be the student's individual work
- may be the result of one or more rewrites
• Lab reports at all levels, K–12, follow the same format
- Forming a question or hypothesis
- Provides background information to explain origin of question/hypothesis
- Develops a question or hypothesis that can be tested
- Clearly communicates ideas
- Designing the investigation
- Describes a logical procedure
- Develops an experimental plan that addresses the hypothesis/question
- Clearly communicates ideas
- Collecting and presenting data
- Records reasonable data
- Designs a data table
- Transforms original data into a more useful format (graph, chart, percentages, etc)
- Analyzing and interpreting results
- Responds to question/hypothesis with some support from data
- Summarizes results accurately
How is a work sample evaluated?
Scoring guide
State
Student Language
Integrating work samples into the module
Learning Experience 3: Lighting the Bulb
•Focus on collecting data. In this activity, that amounts to drawing the different circuits that the studentstested, both the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t work. Clearly drawn, labeled diagrams of the circuits being tested are an easy way to record test results, and they will be useful in explaining their procedure and showing their results when the students do the work sample.
•Writing a paragraph describing what is required to make the bulb light up would be good practice for writing a conclusion to their experiment.
Learning Experience 8: Series Circuits
•Again, making clearly labeled drawings provides an easy way to record data.
•Talking about variables would be a good idea after this activity. A variable is simply anything that might change the outcome of the experiment. In this activity, there are a number of things that might affect the brightness of the bulb—strength of the battery, freshness of the battery, number of batteries, size of the bulb, wiring scheme, etc. Students will probably come up with other variables that you don’t think will change the results in any way. These are still possible variables since they might change the results; we won’t know for sure until we test them.
•The important idea in science experiments is that scientists change only one variable at a timewhen they do an experiment. So, if you change the number of batteries, you want to keep everything else the same as it was before. If you change the number of batteries and the size of the light bulb, you don’t know which change produced the results you observed. Scientists want their experiment to be a fair test.
•A useful analogy for the fair test idea is a foot race. If we want to see who can run fastest, the only variable we want to change is the runner. All the other possible variables (length of track, terrain, track surface, etc.) must remain the same for every single runner.
Learning Experience 9: Brightness Meters
•After the students build and test their brightness meters, the challenge is to create a configuration that will make the brightest possible bulb, and to make another circuit to make a bulb that is as dim as possible but not off. (Teacher’s Guide p 139) In order to produce a work sample from this activity, we need to modify this activity slightly.
- Before doing this part of the activity, ask the students to think about variables that might be important in making the bulb bright or dim. Using the Planning Board form will make this activity a little easier.
- Have some of the students go for the bright bulb, while others go for the dim one. Use a circuit containing one bulb and one battery as the “standard” that the other circuits will be compared to.
- Now the students can identify the variable that they think will produce the effect they want. Once this is done, they can record what they think will happen. “If we _____ , then the light bulb will get _____ .” This is their hypothesis.
- Once they know what their hypothesis is, deciding how to test it is fairly straight forward. In this case, drawing the “standard” circuit and their proposed modification take care of most of the procedure. A sentence or two of explanation should be added to make it clear. In this case, student procedures will be essentially the some. That’s OK. The process of developing the work sample is more important that original thinking in the procedure.
- Now, the students can collect and record their data. If they have time, it would be good for the students to try more than one run through their experiment. For example, if they are adding another battery to make the bulb brighter, they could try adding two, then three, then four batteries. If they are adding more bulbs to make it dimmer, they could try two, three, and four bulbs. More data will produce more interesting graphs in the next step.
- Once they have some data, the students should transform it into some useful form. A bar graph would be an easy way to compare the brightness of the bulbs in the different trials.
- As the students write the conclusion for their experiment, they want to look at their data to see what it tells them. Was their hypothesis correct? Can they use their number data to support their conclusion? Remind the students that it is OK if their hypothesis wasn’t correct. The important thing is for them ot explain how they know their hypothesis is incorrect.
C:\Documents and Settings\Owner\My Documents\School\Elementary Project\Modules\4-Circuits & Pathways\Inquiry Work Sample - Circuits.doc 11/16/2018