6th Grade Earth Science research assignment

“In grades 6–8, students gain sophistication and experience in using models, satellite images, and maps to represent and interpret processes and features. In the early part of this grade span, students continue to investigate geological materials’ properties and methods of origin. As their experiments become more quantitative, students should begin to recognize that many of the earth’s natural events occur because of processes such as heat transfer. Students in these grades should recognize the interacting nature of the earth’s four major systems: the geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere. They should begin to see how the earth’s movement affects both the living and nonliving components of the world. Attention shifts from the properties of particular objects toward an understanding of the place of the earth in the solar system and changes in the earth’s composition and topography over time. Middle school students grapple with the importance and methods of obtaining direct and indirect evidence to support current thinking. They recognize that new technologies and observations change our explanations about how things in the natural world behave.”

Massachusetts Science and Technology/Engineering Curriculum Framework, October 2006

The MA frameworks for 6^th grade science already include plenty of opportunities for critical thinking. It calls on students to learn about varying systems within the Earth and look at Earth as a planet in the universe. It is then the teacher’s job to connect the two and make students understand that the two things are connected. The most crucial part of encouraging critical thinking comes from the requirement to find direct and indirect evidence to support their thinking. As a teacher in this field, I would make it my primary goal to give students the primary skills involved in investigating scientific material. When doing labs I would ensure they have the right graphing and measuring skills and understand how to use certain equipment. I would also rehearse the scientific method and go over proper lab behavior. After that, any time we approach a new unit I would implore the students to take out their science toolbox and go to work. For example, take a unit on weather with the learning standard: “Explain how the transfer of energy through radiation, conduction, and convection contributes to global atmospheric processes, such as storms, winds, and currents.” Building on prior knowledge about thermal energy from the sun and radiaton, I would ask students to come up with an educated guess to the question, where does our weather come from? Hoping that they would then come up with many different answers, ranging from simple answers like ‘the sun,’ to more complex ones including references to the water cycle and currents, I would push students to investigate to find the right answer. By performing different experiments, making observations, and taking data, students should be able to intelligently answer this question. To take things to a critical level, I would give them deeper questions about: the impact of the weather on different aspects of life on Earth, how easily weather on our planet would change if the Earth moved differently or were in a different position in relation to the sun, and excite them with possibilities about harnessing or learning from the weather.

I think that the 6^th grade frameworks for science are very basic but ask for and suggest that teachers take the standards and frameworks and build upon them to develop critical thinkers. As students are learning science, the most effective way to get them to learn and understand is for them to practice it, to be little scientists. This is very easy to create in labs or with small classroom experiments. The only criticism I have is that these sorts of scenarios are left entirely up to teachers and there are no examples or suggestions of how it may look.