Science Methods Blog

Week 13 - Melting Ice News/Introduction For this week in Science Methods, we explored the lesson plan from last week that we were asked to critique. This was a nice way to explore the idea of climate change from a conceptual level. Being able to think about what we did, and how relevant this was to our current understanding of teaching science. One such think I enjoyed about the lesson was that this helped me engage with the material because of its relevancy . Because we looked at an actual issue in our communities, this helped me take a deeper look into the science of climate change. This lab experience helped me reflect on how I want to help my students learn science.  We also discussed teaching and learning in academia. A current problem is how we have moved into this methodology of "teaching to the test," rather than teaching for understanding. As a result, we lag behind our peers. If we were to take approaches like the SWH Approach, we can narrow the gap. This ...

Week 12 - Intro to Climate Change News/Introduction This will be a short intro because we had our geology quiz! But we started off by discussing the documentary  Before the Flood. We learned many things on climate change and how our actions have contributed to the rise in greenhouse gases (methane and carbon dioxide). One contributing factor has to do with the denial of climate change, despite evidence showing.  For our lab investigation, we looked at NASA's Images of Change, and were shocked at some of the images. During this time, we asked about questions that students would ask. But these images were shocking! During this time we also discussed the idea of climate versus weather and came up with an important distinction - weather is a daily measure, while climate is a measure based on the weather for the last 30 years.  The main part of our investigation was looking at the Iowa goldfinch. Is the goldfinch in danger? We looked at weather data at different regions of Iow...

Week 11: Sand, Geodes, Erosion river bank erosion Courtesy of: Mick Garratt, https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/565767 News/Introduction We started this week with a quick pedagogical reflection on the sweater articles that we read last week. A big question that we have to ask is how does this apply to teaching and learning? It is important that we let students explore topics to help them with their scientific understanding. For the first part of our lab experience, we looked at sand collected from different sources through telescopes: We then looked at geodes for the second part of today's lab experience. We learned about Archimedes Law with respect to geodes. (W(air)/W(air)-W(water)). This is an equation for specific gravity. For geodes, if the specific gravity of the geode in question is less than 2.7, the geode is hollow. The lower the specific gravity, the more hollow the geode is. If the specific gravity is 2.7 or more, the geode is not hollow.  My partner and I picked a rock, ...