In the Classroom edited by
View from My Classroom
David L. Byrum Flowing Wells High School Tuscon, AZ 85716
Curriculum Alignment Projects: Toward Developing a Need to Know
K. David Pinkerton Smoky Hill High School, 16100 E. Smoky Hill Road, Aurora, CO 80015;
[email protected] As a 22-year veteran high school chemistry teacher, I experimented with an approach to curriculum design named Curriculum Alignment Projects (CAPs). This article provides a general description of CAPs using a detailed example named “Bicarbonate Squeeze Play” (BSP) and reports the preliminary outcomes from a semester study of the effects of CAPs on student learning, motivation, and attitudes.
After demonstrating how easy it is with a squeeze of my hand to cause the dropper pipet to reach the bottom of a twoliter plastic soda bottle, I asked the students “How do you think you could cause the same action but with a chemical reaction?” After allowing some initial brainstorming, I explained that students would spend an entire semester learning the chemistry needed to answer this question successfully. In effect, BSP aligns all of the semester’s topics and tasks with the student-centered goal of maximum personal success on the CAP project. This approach contrasts with a traditional chemistry curriculum design that offers students a “because it’s in the next chapter” rationale for why certain topics are studied. Figure 1 illustrates how the BSP task aligns curriculum. Five layers of curricular organization are depicted: focus questions, concept clusters, formal labs, tests, and menu activities. Focus questions provide students with an inquirybased cognitive lens through which they can view topics within a concept cluster. For example, the focus question “What happens when moving particles interact?” centers every discussion and activity in the kinetic molecular theory concept cluster. When students get confused about pressure, I can redirect their thinking by referring to the way in which objects interact in their everyday world.
Bicarbonate Squeeze Play as an Example of CAPs On the first day of class, students were presented with the following long-term (18-week) task: Cause a Cartesian diver (dropper pipet floating in a twoliter plastic soda bottle filled with water) to reach the bottom of the diving chamber in exactly one minute. You must use a chemical reaction (baking soda and vinegar), housed in a separate reaction vessel, to cause the diver to dive. At exactly the same time that you start your chemical reaction to cause diving, another team will begin its reaction. The team whose diver touches the bottom closest to exactly one minute advances in an allschool tournament.
Focus question Conceptual clusters
How do you know when things are different?
What happens when moving particles interact?
Measurement
Kinetic molecular theory
Boyle's law
Formal labs
Menu activities 198
What makes reactions "go" and "stop"?
Conservation Thermodynamics laws and kinetics
Molecular weight determination
Hess' law
Chemical formula determination
Rates of reactions
Test 1
Test 2
Test 3
Figure 1. Vertical and horizontal organization of first semester chemistry class afforded by Curriculum Alignment Project depicting interlocking dependence of all activities leading to BSP.
All activities lead to and support...
Penny lab Relative mass of gases
Tests
What happens to mass and energy in reactions?
Test 4
Bicarbonate squeeze play authentic assessment
Final
Quizzes, chapter problems, menu projects, AMP journal, etc.
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 78 No. 2 February 2001 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
In the Classroom
Concept clusters introduce students to the formal language of chemistry topics. State standards guide the clusters’ content. Ideally, through the focus question, the teacher helps students learn that their inquiry leads to an important body of knowledge. Next, the teacher explicitly teaches the cognitive connections among concepts within a cluster by orchestrating a rich mix of student activities. Explicit teaching leads to the last three layers in Figure 1. Formal labs represent experiential linchpins with which students associate abstract concepts. For example, collision theory, concentration, and temperature are concepts from the kinetics concept cluster. Instead of only reading textbook definitions of these terms, I ask students, “How do temperature and initial concentration of baking soda and vinegar affect the time it takes for your diver to hit the bottom?” This question leads to the Rates of Reaction lab, which in turn leads to greater success in BSP. Finally, tests and menu projects broaden students’ context of each concept cluster, maximize success opportunities for a wider range of learners, and provide interim assessment information. Examples of nonmandatory menu projects include modeling a Boltzmann’s distribution by popping 100 kernels of popcorn without a lid under a variety of conditions; constructing a Galilean thermometer that can distinguish among boiling water, room-temperature water, and ice-water temperatures; and investigating vapor pressure equilibrium by making clouds in a two-liter plastic soda bottle. At the end of the semester, students test their “inventions” in a single elimination tournament. Teams whose apparatus and procedure work accurately and reproducibly usually advance. Curriculum Alignment Projects have some features in common with other innovative chemistry curricula. CAPs promote a “concepts first” outlook to curricular activities (1, 2), which features what Bowen and Phelps (3) call an interactive model of curriculum development and employs a dynamic equilibrium among content, assessment, and instruction. The tasks in CAPs are authentic and driven by students’ need to know rather than by institutional curricular inertia (4–6). Components of CAPs include small-group work (7, 8), feedback from natural phenomena using inexpensive take-home materials (9, 10), and open-ended, long-term, multiplesolution problems that encourage a consultancy model between teachers and students (11, 12). Finally, by means of layers of support features, CAPs systematically integrate multiple teaching methods (2) that draw from cognitive science approaches to curriculum design (13, 14). There are also important differences between CAPs and many current chemistry curricula. Most important is the alignment function of CAPs. Few argue that the individual components of chemistry teaching reform, mentioned above, lack merit. Taken modularly, each innovation can affect students’ performance, motivation, and attitudes. But how can already overworked teachers meld together such curricular attributes systematically? CAPs may be a vehicle. Once teachers decide on an appropriate CAP task, further curriculum choices are inspired by asking, “What must students know and do in order to successfully complete the CAP?” For example, in addition to inventing a solution to the Cartesian diver problem in the BSP, students are required to complete both an engineering report featuring extensive chemical calculations and a conceptual report that probes
many common misconceptions in chemistry. They also participate in a debriefing interview in which I assess their real-time chemical understanding. Each activity of the semester helps students succeed in one or more aspect of BSP. In order for students to understand why the pipet dives, kinetic molecular theory and gas laws are discussed. To determine the amount of baking soda theoretically required to cause diving, conservation laws and stoichiometric relationships are taught. When students discover how subtle changes in the amounts of reactants affect diving conditions, the measurement principles of accuracy and precision are studied. Finally, when students attempt to control diving time, they investigate how temperature and concentration affect diving times. From a student’s perspective, CAPs provide an interesting and worthwhile task that coordinates what they do during a semester—unlike a teacher-selected theme, what is next in the text, or the modular implementation of selected teaching reforms (15, 16). As Wright noted, “The open-ended projects are conceptually simple, but there are enough details and enough unanticipated problems that arise during the projects to provide students with many opportunities for creativity and practice in problem solving” (9, p 830). In short, Curriculum Alignment Projects frame the curriculum in the context of a concrete task that students perceive as valuable, rather than external or abstract. Outcomes of CAPs Three categories of outcomes resulted from an 18-week study involving 66 high school students in college preparatory chemistry: motivation, achievement, and teaching.
Motivation The first category is motivation. Students’ questions give teachers insights to motivation, and changes were noticed in the type of questions asked. Initially students asked if certain tasks would be graded or if the material would be on the test. Gradually, as students proceeded to solve the BSP task, unsolicited questions began to guide each class period. I was unable to lecture for more than a few minutes before students began to ask questions about how the day’s topic would help them answer the focus question for the semester, namely “How does one get the diver to dive in one minute?” Students seemed to want to know about the chemistry necessary to solve the BSP problem because they were genuinely curious and wanted ideas or strategies. Their cognitive focus changed from how to get a grade to how to solve the BSP problem. Their motivation for doing chemistry seemed to change from obtaining external rewards to satisfying internal needs. Menu projects help illustrate students’ self-motivation. In the first semester, 62% of students self-selected one menu project and 15% selected two. The mean score on the universal scoring rubric discussed below for these projects was 3.3 out of 5. Roughly, this translates to a B letter grade, or “proficient”, using Standards language. The shift in motivation spilled over into second semester. I implemented another CAP, named Concept City, in which teams of students designed and constructed a model city on a 30 × 60-cm board. Students divided the city into neighborhoods built around chemical concept clusters such as equilibrium,
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acid/base, conservation of mass, and oxidation/reduction. In each neighborhood, students performed experiments with household substances that illustrated the chemical ideas for that neighborhood. Teams created their own city identity (amusement parks were popular) and connected each neighborhood to a city theme. Students required far less reminding and prodding as they incorporated many of their second-semester projects into concept city. They were not intimidated by another long-term project and seemed to find the open-endedness more an opportunity to be creative than an obstacle.
Achievement The second category of outcomes deals with student achievement. All students successfully designed, constructed, and tested a BSP device that caused the diver to dive. If learning how to accomplish a complex, open-ended, cooperative task is valuable, then this is an important result. Four students did not compete in the tournament and two did not write a report. These students received an audit for the course. For those who finished the report, a universal scoring rubric was used to evaluate performance. In this scheme, a 5-point scale was used in each of six grading criteria (theory, hypothesis, procedure, observations, conclusions, and quality). A score of 5 was reserved for substantially exceeding expectations. A score of four roughly translated to an A letter grade. This rubric was used for all projects, experiments, and major tests in the course (rather than a different rubric for each task). In the universal rubric, a score of 2.5 was deemed minimally competent. Twelve students did not meet this standard, whereas only three students scored below minimum competency, set at the 40th percentile, on the 1993 ACS test. This result suggests that students can answer objective questions asked in isolation from complex context, but still have difficulty assembling explanations from complex naturalistic data sources. These 12 students still passed the course by performing menu projects. Comparisons of standardized test results within and between teachers of the same course were revealing. The withinteachers results show a wide range of scores on the ACS objective test. Mean scores in three classes for this study ranged from the 72nd to the 51st percentile. Similar spreads occurred for other teachers. Between-teachers results show no pattern of high scores for one teacher over another for the last several years. A mean score of the 61st percentile for this study falls in the middle ground for performance on the ACS test at the study high school. Perhaps more interesting, but certainly not definitive, was the result from a portion of the 1996 ACS conceptual test also given to students. In this study, the class scoring highest on the ACS traditional objective test scored lowest on the conceptual test and the class scoring lowest on the traditional ACS test scored highest on the conceptual test. The range of results on the conceptual test was much smaller than the range on the objective test. Perhaps the CAP approach does more to engage students conceptually who frequently score lower on traditional measures of chemical achievement. Unfortunately, no between-teacher comparisons could be made because no other teachers gave the conceptual test.
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Teaching The third outcome category involves teaching. I learned that compelling tasks are not enough to ensure students’ success. I had to explicitly teach aspects of success on longterm design projects. First, I had to teach students how to plan and pace their work. This took the form of incentive points for accomplishing significant interim steps of BSP. Second, I taught the connections among concept clusters explicitly and reinforced those connections with everyday applications. I learned a new way to conceive of curriculum design. Doing the BSP project became the lens through which I viewed topical exposure. For example, reaction rates traditionally are covered in the second semester in high school chemistry. But since BSP required this knowledge, I moved that topic into first semester. This move forced me to coordinate measurement issues with an introduction to kinetic molecular theory, gas laws, and stoichiometry so that students would have the appropriate background knowledge to understand reaction rates. Without BSP, I would have no motivation to change my approach to curriculum design. Further, the CAP approach led to the design of a new laboratory experiment on reaction rates in which students varied the concentration of vinegar for a constant amount of baking soda in their BSP apparatus and measured the dive time. Students not only learned how concentration affects reaction rate, but they gained valuable practical experience with their BSP apparatus before the tournament. In effect, the conceptual and experimental demands of accomplishing the BSP task, rather than district curricula or state standards, served as the major impetus for curricular choices. Literature Cited 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.
15. 16.
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Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 78 No. 2 February 2001 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
