Objectives
The North Carolina science standards - which correlate closely with the national standards - that this unit will address include: designing and conducting investigations to demonstrate an understanding of scientific inquiry, making inferences from data, thinking critically and logically to bridge the relationships between evidence and explanations, and recognizing and evaluating alternative explanations. All of these fall under the heading of "Science as Inquiry," which focuses on process skills to support development of reasoning and problem solving abilities. The National Research Council states that "scientific inquiry refers to the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and propose explanations based on the evidence derived from their work." In 1910, John Dewey criticized the state of science education as just getting students to memorize a collection of facts. He argued that science should be taught as a way of thinking or as a process. Using detective fiction to teach process skills in science will help in teaching students new ways of thinking. Many critics of current education practices complain that students no longer know how to "think." This unit is meant to address some of those concerns.
In addition to the science standards, this unit will also address some of the language arts standards in our state. These will include refining and understanding the use of argument, exploring and evaluating the problem solution process, and studying the characteristics of literary genres. Reading detective fiction will also allow students to draw inferences and conclusions, and give them the chance to study the characteristics specific to the mystery genre. Although I have concerns about the style of writing and Victorian language that the students most likely have limited experience with, I hope to use the text as an opportunity to discuss the use of context clues and discuss the way language changes through history.
My particular school is a sixth throught eighth grade middle school with approximately twelve hundred students. I teach on an A day/B day block schedule and I typically have 28-34 students in a class, for an average total of 180 students. Middle school science classes in my district are heterogeneously grouped, which means that I can have the highest achievers, the learning disabled, and ESL (English as a Second Language) students all in the same class. This requires a great deal of creativity, differentiated instruction, and advance planning. This unit will utilize strategies that can be differentiated to be used in small groups, but can also lend themselves to whole class discussions easily.
The emphasis in middle school in our state has always been on math and language arts instruction. End of the year testing is focused on those two subjects. While we do test in science and social studies, the scores on those tests do not count toward our accountability goals, so because there is less pressure on science and social studies teachers, we sometimes feel as though we are teaching elective classes. The focus on math and language arts is also in the elementary schools, where science is taught "if there is time." Very often students come to middle school with little to no science background. Science content we used to assume students would have when coming to middle school is no longer part of their prior knowledge. We now have to assume zero background in science content. Fortunately, the attitude towards science education is changing, and science will be tested in fifth and eighth grades starting next year.
One of the strategies I have employed in the last few years in an effort to make science more relevant in middle school is to create interdisciplinary units. I have learned how to engage other teachers in this and it has been successful for most of us. I will be discussing one idea for an integrated part of this unit.
Comments: