Features of the Foundation Science Curriculum
Components
All modules in the Foundation Science curriculum, include:
- Class set of student books containing all readings and investigations.
- Teacher Guide with support for teaching each learning experience, including questions to help facilitate student understanding and in-depth support for various instructional strategies.
- Implementation Guide that provides science background on strategies of the curriculum, and references to other teacher and student resources suitable for the curriculum.
- Pre- and post-evaluations, end-of-unit assessments, and rubrics for interpreting responses.
Features
- Each module links to other disciplines, but is a rigorous course that will prepare students for higher-level science. It is not general science.
- The curriculum stimulates students to consider taking more advanced science courses.
- It requires no more equipment or consumables than are available in a modest high-school chemistry/physics laboratory.
Learning Experiences
Learning experiences are lessons of three to four days. Three to four learning experiences make up one unit. The instructional material is organized around a teaching/learning framework that connects the concepts from one learning experience to the next and provides a structure for the learning experiences. Each learning experience begins with a story designed to engage student interest and provide a contextual framework upon which to build understanding.
For example, in one of the chemistry learning experiences, students explore solutions. They are confronted with two stories related to the dangers of drinking too much or too little fluid during prolonged physical activity. Students conduct experiments to uncover the chemical reasons behind these incidents. Through these investigative experiences and subsequent discussions students find out about fundamental principles relating to the nature and properties of solutions and osmosis.
- Each lesson begins with a context setting to pique student interest, connect the lesson to materials that have gone before, and provide teachers with the opportunity to assess students' preconceived ideas.
- In the next phase of the learning experience, students carry out an investigation or experiment that enables them to engage actively with the phenomenon and forms the basis for constructing new conceptual understanding. They may design experiments, analyze data, reach conclusions and collaborate with their peers to reach conclusions.
- In the third phase of the learning experience, processing for meaning, students analyze and synthesize their data and organize their ideas based on experiences in the investigation to come to new understandings of the concept.
- At the end of the learning experience, students are challenged to apply their new understandings to new situations and prepare to extend the concepts and process skills just learned to conceptual concerns that will be raised in the next learning experience, where they will again work through the four phases of the learning cycle.
Throughout each learning experience,students relate their work and understandings to the story that forms the context and framework of that experience.
Each sequenced learning experience investigates a concept that links to the ones in the preceding and following learning experiences. What a student learns about one concept helps the student come to understand the concepts introduced thereafter.
Conceptual Focus
The physics and chemistry modules of Foundation Science serve as an introductory course. They build on ideas and skills related to physics and chemistry that have been learned in grades 6–8. They prepare the student for a second semester or full-year of physics/chemistry at a higher grade. The courses support national high school standards and benchmarks and a synthesis of many state standards for high school, selecting from them the standards that are appropriate for a ninth grader's first experience with physics and chemistry. The standards include content, skills and procedures, and related social/ethical implications, historical context, and general science processes. The curriculum also connects with mathematics skills by using mathematics language and processes to represent newly understood science concepts as needed.
The conceptual flow of the chemistry curriculum starts with common high school experience.
- In Unit 1: Organization of Matter, the students are introduced to the distinctions between substances and mixtures and between compounds and elements, they consider and measure the physical and chemical properties of different substances, learn chemical names and formulas, and are introduced to the Periodic Table.
- In Unit 2: Physical and Chemical Change, students delve into phenomena experienced less directly in everyday life, the interaction of molecules in phase changes, mixtures, and chemical reactions. They explore the factors that affect rates of reaction, and the role of energy as a contributor to reactions and as a product of reaction.
- In Unit 3: Atomic Structure and Bonding, the students investigate properties of interacting elements at the atomic level. They inquire into the structure of the atom and learn about electron distribution in the bonds and the related properties of ionic, covalent, and metallic substances.
Learning "Stories"
Research into how people best learn science has demonstrated that hands-on direct experience with phenomena associated with specific concepts can yield both in-depth and sustained understanding of those concepts. This investigative approach is a natural learning process initiated nearly from birth and continued throughout the learner's life. Foundation Science incorporates these understandings into its design for teaching and learning.
Another natural device for learning is the use of story, a device underused in science education. Throughout human history, cultures have used narrative to pass on information about history, tradition, natural phenomena, and essential skills and knowledge. Individuals often attempt to clarify and make sense of things by creating a narrative that provides a pathway for understanding. Foundation Science uses stories both as a means for engaging students in contexts that interest them and as a framework for organizing and applying their new conceptual understandings.
Every learning experience starts with a story that can provoke wonder and interest. Use of sports drinks may be a common experience, but reading the story of a life and death experience with sports drinks sets up a narrative that calls for explanations. This makes the context for learning more powerful. As students seek explanations, they become a continuing narrator, filling in the rest of the story. The new investigations in the learning experience are sources of new developments in the story. The teacher carries the story narrative through each step of the "learning cycle" and invites students to provide the best resolution or closure possible at the end based on their newly acquired understandings.
The introduction of narrative into science complements the traditional expository character of scientific discourse. It brings the student into the science. Once there, the discussion and analysis of that science then require the accurate and precise exposition. Finally the student brings the content of that exposition back to the narrative for resolution and attainment of a layperson's clear understanding.
Teachers' Comments on the Use of Story in Learning Experiences [pdf]
