The most powerful phenomena from an educational perspective are culturally or personally relevant or consequential to students. Source: Using Phenomena in NGSS-Designed Lessons and Units Focusing investigations on compelling phenomena can help sustain students’ science learning. They get interested in and identify with science as a way of understanding and improving real world contexts. Students who come to see how science ideas can help explain and model phenomena related to compelling real world situations learn to appreciate the social relevance of science. For example, instead of simply learning about the topics of photosynthesis and mitosis, students are engaged in building evidence-based explanatory ideas that help them figure out how a tree grows.Įxplaining phenomena and designing solutions to problems allow students to build general science ideas in the context of their application to understanding phenomena in the real world, leading to deeper and more transferable knowledge. In contrast, students might not understand the importance of learning science ideas that teachers and curriculum designers know are important but that are unconnected from phenomena.īy centering science education on phenomena that students are motivated to explain, the focus of learning shifts from learning about a topic to figuring out why or how something happens. Students are able to identify an answer to "why do I need to learn this?" before they even know what the “this” is. Despite their centrality in science and engineering, phenomena have traditionally been a missing piece in science education, which too often has focused on teaching general knowledge that students can have difficulty applying to real world contexts.Īnchoring learning in explaining phenomena supports student agency for wanting to build science and engineering knowledge.
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