ACE+in+the+Hole

Rob, Corey, Jenay, Brittany responses

- Chapter 3, #1 “How can educators harness young children’s shared base of understanding and skill to help them learn science? Knowing that children come into school with ideas about the world, nature, etc, teachers can design inquiry lessons that build on what students already know.

- Chapter 3, #2 “How can children’s misconceptions about science act as stepping-stones to greater scientific understanding? How does this differ from past thinking about children’s misconceptions?” The process of determining why the misconception is "wrong" can help students to learn more about how science works - having evidence for ideas, changing ideas to fit what the evidence is, creating theories/hypotheses, and having scientific argument. This is different from past thinking about misconceptions because it uses the misconception to teach, as opposed to prior practices of telling students that the misconception is wrong and stating what the correct thinking is.

- Chapter 4, #1 “How does the idea of building on core concepts over longer periods of time differ from the science practice you remember from your own experiences in school? What do you see as the benefits and challenges to teaching this way?” Our group has distinct memories of learning something one time and it was wasn't connected to other topics. Everything we learned was "new" at the time we learned it and there was no application of it. The benefit of teaching the core concept way is that students are continuously building their knowledge base and are accomplishing legit learning. Another benefit is that teachers prioritize what is important for students to learn. The challenge is that you have to rely on other teachers to be teaching what they're supposed to and that teachers within the same chain of learning need to agree on what is important.

- Chapter 4, #3 “As a prospective teacher, what ideas would you have for adapting a single science unit to fulfill both short-term and long-term goals in a learning progression?” We could have a long term experiment/project that both teaches the immediate lesson and also incorporate more long-term goals for the more general standards. For example, Corey gave the example of a project that includes charting the phases of the moon and for the chemistry aspect we could do a whole unit including a long-term forensic chemistry experiment that would continuously add to data. Overall, our ideas use a key concept and develop it over time, and continuously come back to it in later units.

- Other “Describe the conceptual change theory of learning. Give some examples within your group's subject areas for each of the three types of conceptual change.” The conceptual change theory of learning ....more to come later