Weaving concepts into contexts

Contexts can be a powerful way to grow students’ content knowledge and conceptual understanding. For example, stream monitoring and assessment involves learning about pH (chemistry/acids and bases), stream flow (physics/velocity), macroinvertebrates (biology/habitat) and substrates (Earth systems/geological characteristics).

The context adds relevance, which might be missing if the content/concepts were taught in isolation.

When choosing a context, consider the underlying science concepts that you want to cover.

Ākonga understanding of concepts tends to build in sequence and become more fully developed over time. Repeated experiences with concepts via a number of topics or contexts enables ākonga to consolidate this knowledge and understanding. By having an awareness of these concepts, you can scaffold student understanding while engaging them in a meaningful context.

Prompting questions/ngā pātai

• What are science concepts? Can you name some?

• Is there a difference between science contexts and science concepts?

• Why is it important to know which concepts underpin a topic or context?

• What does it mean when we say the understanding of science concepts builds in sequence and becomes more fully developed over time?

• Does your current planning system include science concepts? If not, how might you change this to include them?

• The progression model encourages us to engage students with increasingly complex contexts. How can this also build students’ conceptual understanding?

Transcript

Dianne Christenson

When I start with a context, I mindmap it – everything that I can think of that links to that context.

Lian Soh

We’re doing this brain dump to try and identify as many of those skills, competencies, content knowledges, types of knowledges that might belong to a big context such as climate change. You can sit down and go back to some of those foundational questions of what is it that you want these kids to leave school with?

Mairi Borthwick

Have we got a good balance of the concepts across the whole year? What are the key skills that are showing up within that context and within those concepts?

Meredith Wilson

Take your context and then use the capabilities to guide you. You know, like what activities could you do that gather and interpret data? What activities do you need to do to find the evidence? What are you doing to critique it?

Carmen Kenton

It’s really important that you show the students the whole thing and then just say this is the part we’re going to look at in this topic so that they can see where it fits into. It’s OK to have this big idea about how it is a complex thing. That’s a useful way of coming in to a wicked problem like climate change.

Mairi Borthwick

With a context, you’ve got the freedom to be delving off in all sorts of directions. That’s what I like about it. You know, you can go into really cool concepts and the kids actually really enjoy it.

Lian Soh

Say if you’re looking at carbon dioxide, you might go down the whole idea of the carbon cycle itself. And while you’re at the carbon cycle, why not look at the nitrogen cycle and the water cycle and then, nek minnit, you’ve gone back into ag-hort, right? And so you’ve got all these different interconnecting ideas.

Carmen Kenton

Because the students’ interest was more able to be utilised, their curiosity grew very quickly and they became very excited about their learning.

Mairi Borthwick

Students could start to see the improvement in the answers they were producing for examinations and things like that because of the skills that we were focusing on. And it wasn’t the fact that we just taught content. It was the fact we taught skills. If you’ve not done it before, yeah, start small.

Acknowledgements

Dianne Christenson, Teacher, Whareama School
Lian Soh, Science and Chemistry Teacher, Pāpāmoa College
Mairi Borthwick, Head of Science, Freyberg High School
Meredith Wilson, HOD Science, Ruapehu College
Carmen Kenton, Science Teacher, Riccarton High School
Science capabilities, Tāhūrangi – New Zealand Curriculum website, Ministry of Education. © Crown Copyright. Released under Creative Commons licence, CC BY-NC 4.0
Generic classroom footage, thanks to Berkley Normal Middle School. © The University of Waikato Te Wānanga o Waikato
Carbon cycle resource. © The University of Waikato Te Wānanga o Waikato