Instructional Activities One to two 50-min periods
Introduction: When teaching the topics of ocean acidification, climate change, ecosystems, and sustainability, helping students model the collaborative nature of science is an important endeavor. When tackling “big problems” scientists from different disciplines directly communicate and divvy up research into projects that best use available resources and lead to more comprehensive understanding. The goal of this lesson is to guide student groups as they plan their experiment and ultimately develop a class-wide, cohesive set of experiments that work together to answer the big question and their group’s individual sub-question.
Main question for upcoming set of labs: What effect does the increasing atmospheric CO2 have on the ocean and its subsystems?
ADVANCED PREP
o that ocean acidification is a situation that requires a systems study (since it has many parts with interactions, emergent properties, reverberating effects, etc.)
o that this situation has a large, global human and economic component – it affects us all, yet there are very different stakeholders
o basic properties of carbon dioxide
o the importance of taking careful notes and keeping a lab notebook
- Set up each class's interest groups - Tally the student requests you received at the end of Lesson 3 to decide on appropriate lab interest groups. We recommend you have 2-4 students in each group. All experiments will collaboratively work together to give insight into ocean acidification and will model real science. Here is a schematic that breaks down the different possible interest groups:
Lesson Specifics:
1. Have students take out their lab notebook.
3. Hand out, or list, the previously assigned student interest groups while students answer the warm up questions (listed in the powerpoint) in their notebook. (Warm up questions = 1. How is OA a global problem? 2. Is OA a situation that requires a systems study? Why or why not? 3. What do you think systems thinking is?)
4. Remind students of their previous work (if needed) and the goal of today’s lesson (see above). This can be quickly achieved by briefly explaining the flow of these lessons and introducing the final summit. Briefly introducing the final summit will help students see where their learning is going and understand why they need to listen and understand today's lesson. In the summit, student groups will present their experimental results and provide recommendations in a manner similar to those in other global summits (explained further in upcoming lessons). Encourage students to make their end product (research results, summit presentation) an easy next step by taking careful notes, pictures, and diagrams throughout today’s lesson as well as during the final lessons in this module.
5. Present the remaining slides in the PowerPoint presentation.
a. Slides 3-4: Use these slides to lead a discussion that emphasizes “thinking” as a process that occurs through logical thoughts, ideas, and possibilities. If students have a difficult time articulating “thinking” ask them to give examples of “not thinking” and work backwards.
Defining "Systems" is much more difficult. This is an area where your non-science enthusiasts should especially weigh in with their point of view. If you have the book, “
Uncovering Student Ideas in Science, Vol. 4” by Page Keeley, page 81 contains a great assessment probe that leads to a terrific discussion. This is the probe used in Slide 4. You can print Dr. Keeley’s worksheet, or print slide 4 and have students complete it independently. Next, have a class discussion on possible explanations. As an answer, Dr. Keeley argues that, “The best answer is that everything except for the pile of sand and box of nails can be considered a system. If you remove some of the sand, it is still a pile of sand….The nails in the box do not interact with or influence each other….However there are ways one could stretch this to justify that the sand pile or box of nails is a system. For example, the atoms that make up the sand or nails interact with one another.” Students also like to talk about gravity being a node in a system which would certainly have implications to anything in a pile. At this point, there may not be any "right" answers, which is helpful when discussing the process of thinking.
b.
Slide 5: This lists the
Waters Foundation poster of the thirteen habits of a systems thinker. At the end of this module we’ll come back to these habits and have students evaluate whether this unit helped them build these skills and fostered the development of these good habits. Introduce this slide at this time to give context for practical uses of systems thinking. Systems thinking is a process that doesn't always come naturally, but can be useful in many areas. Developing the habits of a systems thinker help us tackle big, sometimes ambiguous problems. Have students give examples of when these habits might come in handy (during typical high school dramatic relationships, when studying complex scienctific phenomena such as ocean acidification, and many more).
c.
Slides 6-7: Like any trade, there are tools for systems thinkers to use that help them achieve their tasks of thinking holistically, exploring complexity, and sharpening awareness of how the parts of the whole interrelate and result in emergent properties. See the Waters Foundation website (
http://www.watersfoundation.org) for more information and examples.
d. Slide 8: This slide begins to incorporate general systems diagrams into the pertinent content on the carbon cycle. The balancing versus reinforcing loops were first seen in slide 6. Have them break those words down to guess what each means and what this slide shows. (Reinforcing, because the hysteria is not balanced by anything and just increases and increases with nothing to stop the hysteria. The "+" on each arrow indicates the "spiraling out of control" nature of this reinforcing loop.) Remind students of Lesson 3's group activity of drawing CO2's loops. In response to the powerpoint question of, "What about the CO2 loop in our environment?" they should be able to remember that the situation was once somewhat balanced, but now evidence suggests it is not. Research and experimentation can tell us more about what is currently happening with this cycle.
e. Slide 9: This is a duplicate of what was completed in Lesson 3 on the board. It is good to show this again, in this form, to emphasize the importance of understanding that for many years this situation was balanced. However, now with increasing combustion reactions, we must ask the questions: What is the counterpart to all of that CO2? The ocean? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Do we have all the answers? (no) Can we study this in our class with our resources? (yes!)
f. Slides 10-12: Build off of this last question to begin exploring how studying this in your class will work.
- Have students write down the main question in their notebook: What effect does the increasing atmospheric CO2 have on the ocean and its subsystems?
- Lead a discussion first as a class that allows students to brainstorm how they can contribute by experimenting in your lab to this research question. You can also use a Think-Pair-Share here as an option. Questions to get them talking and thinking:
--What could you measure in the lab, what outcome will you be hoping to observe or measure, what have you measured in previous labs, how will you know what you know? (Possible student answers: pH, amount of CO2, source of CO2, nutrient levels, rate of shell dissolution, mass, temperature, salinity, population count, optical density with spectrophotometers or fluorometer)
- What evidence could help you advocate for your interest group?
- What is your subsystem? Remind students that their subsystem should be pertinent to their interest group.
- What systems component are you bringing into your experiment? For systems science we need a great deal of data and a variety of data. How are you working toward achieving both the large amount of data and variety? Also, we generally use multiple stressors in systems experiments. This means that instead of changing only one variable and keeping everything else constant, we allow for multiple variables. This mimics what occurs more naturally in nature. For instance, if you change the amount of light, temperature often changes with it. Instead of allowing one to change and unnaturally holding the other constant, we allow them to change as they may together. The way this is accomplished is through experimental design - ensure the data you gather allows you to trace back to what caused the outcome observed.
- You can leave Slide 12 on the board to help remind students what needs to be completed as they prepare for their experiment. Also, having students follow this experimental plan procedure tends to lead to successful implementation of these types of labs in the classroom:
Experimental Plan:
- Refine your question – work off of the main question to narrow it and make it your own. Make it interesting and applicable to your interest group.
- Develop your hypothesis. In addition to using “if…then…because…” you should focus on your prediction and the measures that will tell you if your hypothesis is supported or not.
- Develop a procedure draft. Include a flow chart mapping out the steps you will take.
- List all materials you will need, complete with size and amount.
6. Monitor student groups by walking around. Listen to each group’s plan and provide appropriate feedback and suggestions. As they decide on experiments, have student list what they plan to test and measure on a large piece of posted butcher paper. This will allow students to build off of others’ experiments instead of replicating. For example, if two groups want to study how diatoms respond to various temperatures within acidified water, see if they can come up with a way to alter their experiments to build on each other (e.g. perhaps one can model their temperature from tropical zones and the other from arctic zones). Many teachers find it helpful to track students' experiments as you move about the classroom. Here is a worksheet to help you track their experiments:
Tracking Student Experiments.
7. At the end of the lesson, each group should hand in their experimental plan. Use their materials list to begin preparing for the upcoming lab and to provide needed assistance for a class set of cohesive experiments.
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