Rationale
My students attend Yerba Buena High School (YBHS) in San Jose, California. YBHS is one of 12 large high schools in the East Side Union High School District. Our school population ranges from 1600 to 1700 students where 69.5% of the students are low income and 66.8% are English-Learners. The majority of our population is comprised of Hispanic/Latino (57%) and Asian (32%) students. 6 In 2012, YBHS scored 683 on the Academic Performance Index (API) and did not meet the target of 689. 7 Currently the school is in its fourth year of Program Improvement which is called the Restructuring Stage, which requires the development of an alternative governance to create a plan of major restructuring within the school. 8 YBHS also struggles with a graduation rate of only 65% which is significantly lower than our district's graduation rate of 76%. Many of the students who will participate in this unit will be the first in their family to pursue a college degree. 9
The audiences for this curriculum unit are 10 th/11 th/12 th grade general chemistry students and AP chemistry students. Students opting to take general chemistry typically intend on furthering their education in college because chemistry is a required course for college readiness. Most students who take AP Chemistry are interested in pursuing a science major and take AP chemistry as a way of preparing for their general chemistry course in college. The unit will mainly focus on general chemistry students as the audience but can be modified for the AP chemistry curriculum. It is my intention to teach this unit to the general chemistry students at the beginning of the 4 th quarter during the stoichiometry unit and give students the opportunity to revisit thermochemistry. AP chemistry students will take on this unit in the middle of the 6 th quarter.
Yerba Buena High School students go to 6 classes every day, each class meeting for 58 minutes. AP science classes are designed as a block class and so students who take AP chemistry meet for 2 back-to-back periods. The entire district follows this format in order to allow AP science classes adequate time for labs. The unit is designed so that the activities can be incorporated as subsections in three consecutive units of reactions, stoichiometry, and thermochemistry, with a final wrap up activity that ties the units together. Alternatively, the activities could also be a unit on their own as a review of the three standards that shows how they are interrelated.
Comments: