Bone Talk

One of my early childhood students found an object on walk with his class on a path through the woods near our school.  He brought it to me wondering, “Is this a stone or is it a bone?” 

We looked at it together.  From the shape and heft, it was certainly a bone.  “Where did you find it,” I asked, and he told me about a spot on the trail, “near some deer tracks.” 

“Which do you think it is,” I asked him, “bone or stone?”  “I think it’s a bone,” he said after a few second hopefully.  “I think so too.  Feel the weight.  It’s too light for a stone of the same size. Also, look at those little holes all over it.  Bone is like that.  What kind of bone do you think it is?  Where in an animal’s body do you think this came from?” I queried.

He looked puzzled.  “Is it a bone from a skull?”  He looked doubtful.  The bone was a short, thick oval, with some oddly shaped projections.  “Is it from a leg?  Or a foot?” I continued. 

He clearly didn’t think so, but was quiet for a while.  “What about from a bone from the back, from a spinal column?”  He was still quiet.  “What if this bone had lots of others like it piled on top of it?”  “Yes,” he said eagerly, ‘it could be a backbone.”  “Yes, and then nerves would run down this hole in the center and the shape would let the animal bend in many ways,” I offered.

 “What kind of animal?” he asked.  “What do you think?” I asked.  Quiet again.  Both of us.  I waited.  After the right amount of time, I asked, “Big animal or small animal?”

“Big animal,” he enthused right away.  “What kind of big animals live in those woods?” I went on.  “Deer!  Do you think it’s a deer?” he asked eagerly.  “Yes, I do” I said.  “Let’s look at it with the magnifier.”

“How old is it?  Did the deer just go down there and die?” he wondered.  We looked at the discolored bone, dirty beige with some white patches.  “Old,” he guessed.  “I think so too,” I agreed. 

The white patches puzzled me until I looked closely with the magnifier, seeing many fine, evenly spaced vertical scratches in the recessed white patches.   “Why is some of the bone brownish and some white?” I asked.  Quiet. “Maybe some of the bone was in the dirt and some was sticking out and it got rubbed away?” he offered.  “Maybe, but look at where the patches are.  How would you place the bone in the dirt so only those special places stuck out?” I asked.  Quiet.  We could both see no way to place the bone in that way in the dirt.  I pointed out the scratches and we co-evolved the idea of a small scavenger gnawing on the deer bones lying on the trail.

“Wow!” he exclaimed.  Now we had a fuller story line from a bit of bone lying alongside a woodland trail.  “That’s an interesting bone,” I said.  “I think you should share this with the class.  And show it to your parents tonight.”  It would be a good conversation at home.  I love teaching science.

Negative Stereotypes Damage Learning

Negative stereotypes shown to affect learning, not just performance, a 2010 study finds.  This study, Stereotype Threat PreventsPerceptual Learning, goes beyond the very well documented classic work of Stanford’s Claude Steele.  He found that simply filling out a blank for “Race” on a subject test depressed the scores of African Americans.  Follow up studies found this effect true for women as well as different minorities on a variety of subject tests.  In addition, to depressed performance on subject tests, negative stereotypes depressed performance of stigmatized groups on physical skills such driving or golf putting. One interesting follow up stereotype study found that on math subject tests when Asian women were asked to identify their gender, their performance was depressed.  When they were asked to identify their ethnicity, however, their performance was increased.  

This study on perceptual learning investigated ability to learn precursor skills needed for higher order learning.  This finding takes the problem into the learning process itself, rather than just into task performance.  It may not be that stigmatized group only “choke” on tests when reminded of stereotypes; it may be that stigmatized groups fail to learn important fundamental skills that are prerequisite for learning to solve more complex problems.  The researchers, who were able to separate learning effects from performance effects, studied how stereotype threats affects women’s ability to learn math.  According to lead author Robert Rydell, "if women do not learn relatively simple skills early on, this could spell trouble for them later on when they need to combine a number of more simple skills in new, complicated ways to solve difficult problems. For example, if a young girl does not learn a relatively simple principle of algebra or how to divide fractions because she is experiencing threat, this may hurt her when she has to use those skills to complete problems on geometry, trigonometry, or calculus tests.  Bottom line:  stereotypes hurt.

An Inspirational Teacher

Tony Wagner’s CreatingInnovators:  The Making of Young PeopleWho Will Change the World features a section on Amanda Alonzo, a truly inspirational high school biology teacher, who is a compelling advocate of inquiry science.  Tony argues that innovation, rather than knowledge, is the new engine of economic growth. Our traditional schools stifle innovation by focusing on rote, unconnected, unintegrated factual knowledge.  The skills necessary for innovation, such as questioning, observing, experimenting, networking, and integrative thinking, can be taught.  They can only be learned in an environment that focuses on how to think, rather than what to think.

Tony discovered that Amanda had been the teacher of two of the top forty finalists at the 2010 Intel Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF).  How did Amanda get started in coaching students who, under her guidance, consistently place highly in science fairs?  “Every other teacher at the school who had been asked had declined, but I felt I couldn’t say no as a first-year teacher.” Amanda’s previous experience with science fairs was discouraging.  “What I’d seen wasn’t really science, wasn’t powerful learning, and parents were doing most of the work.” 

Drawing on her experience with inquiry learning, Amanda created an authentic encounter with science for her students.  She focused on the process of doing science, rather than simply passing on science content.  Ironically, her best teaching was in her science fair seminars during lunchtime or after school when she was free to teach questioning, creative thinking, and problem solving in the context of science projects of genuine interest to her students.  “In my classes, I have state standards that I have to teach, which are all about content knowledge.”  Amanda believes that many science teachers think that in order to cover the standards they must give the students all the answers, instead of allowing the time for students to figure out the answers for themselves.  This type of inquiry requires more effort from both the students and the teachers and it needs the time for questioning, experimenting, failing, and trying again.  However, Amanda’s experience, which is solidly backed by educational research, shows student actually learn more and retain more content this way (HowPeople Learn, National Research Council).

Games as Models

I just got back from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) annual conference in Nashville TN.  The NSTA conference is huge and there are many, many good choices of sessions to attend. This is the largest gathering of science teachers in the US, and probably the world, with over 10,000 attendees.  This year I decided to go with a particular objective to focus on since there is no way to glean everything of value at a conference of this size.  I chose some sessions in advance and then left room in my schedule for interesting opportunities.   

Since I’ve been thinking more about the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) practice of modeling, I have begun to see models everywhere in my teaching.  As part of my objective, I chose a workshop on using games to teach environmental science. This workshop looked like a good fit with a curricular area I want to emphasize more and I also wanted to explore the connection between games and models.

When I first saw that models and modeling would be part of the NGSS, I was concerned.  How well would this standard apply to the work I was doing with middle school and elementary school students?  Sure, a globe was a model, and so was the anatomical model of a human torso that let students take out and reassemble organs like the heart, lungs, intestines, the stomach, the liver, and so on.  But wasn’t model building in the scientific sense a pretty sophisticated activity?

The section of the NGSS site discussion Modeling as a Science and Engineering Practice explained that: 

Models include diagrams, physical replicas, mathematical representations, analogies, and computer simulations.

Somewhere else I read that someone had included simulation games in the category of models to use in science instruction.  Surely not all games are models, but many simulation games, computerized or not qualify using NGSS criteria, which includes:

·      Physical

·      Conceptual

·      External

·      Analogs

·      Shared

·      Clear

The games we tried out in our workshop were all clearly physical, external, and shared as we used game boards, game pieces, cards, and our own bodies to enact scenarios.  Games like Oh Deer and The Power Plant Game were definitely conceptual and a key part of their value was their abstraction and simplification of a complex underlying system.  These games help us focus on a limited set of essential elements and learn while having fun.