FCAT Science

I’ve been con­duct­ing full-day teacher train­ing work­shops for the past two weeks at a quaint beach­side ele­men­tary school located in Volu­sia county, Florida. The six hour work­shops are con­ducted for spe­cific grade lev­els, align­ing with their cur­ricu­lum maps for the last 9 weeks of the 2009–2010 school year. The fol­low­ing pho­tos were taken from the 4th and 5th grade teacher ses­sions. Dur­ing the work­shop teach­ers con­ducted numer­ous inquiry-based hands-on sci­ence inves­ti­ga­tions to explore life sci­ence con­cepts. Teach­ers recorded notes, obser­va­tions, and attached spec­i­mens in their inter­ac­tive stu­dent note­books. Inves­ti­ga­tions made con­nec­tions to the Big Ideas 14–17 from Florida’s Next Gen­er­a­tion Sun­shine State Stan­dards. The teach­ers left the work­shop revi­tal­ized, ener­gized, and excited about explor­ing life sci­ence con­cepts with their stu­dents. Great group of teach­ers, and an exam­ple of a  school that has placed empha­sis on the impor­tance of con­duct­ing mean­ing­ful sci­ence with their stu­dents. Dur­ing the teacher train­ing work­shop teach­ers con­ducted the fol­low­ing investigations:

• Con­ducted inves­ti­ga­tions to explore clas­si­fi­ca­tion con­cepts (animal)
• Con­ducted inves­ti­ga­tions to explore clas­si­fi­ca­tion con­cepts (plant)
• Con­ducted inves­ti­ga­tions to explore life cycles within the plant and ani­mal kingdoms
• Con­ducted inves­ti­ga­tions to com­pare and con­trast among the plant and ani­mal kingdoms
• Designed and con­structed a model of a plant or ani­mal cell using a ziplock bag filled with Karo Syrup (rep­re­sents cyto­plasm), with addi­tional mate­ri­als placed within the bag to rep­re­sent the cell organelles.
• Designed and con­structed a class­room ter­rar­ium rep­re­sent­ing a com­plete ecosys­tem (gar­den snails, pill bugs, earth­worms, bird seed, soil, water, and decay­ing plant mate­r­ial were placed inside aquar­i­ums). Con­cepts cov­ered included: inter­de­pen­dence, ecol­ogy, envi­ron­ment, food web, com­mu­nity, sun, energy, energy trans­for­ma­tion, pro­duc­ers, con­sumers, and decomposers.
• The key con­cept inte­grated within all inves­ti­ga­tions under­taken was struc­ture and func­tion in the plant and ani­mal kingdoms.

Teacher uses a micro­scope to observe pond water organisms.

Teacher builds model plant cell from sim­ple house­hold materials.Cell model lab sheet used in mak­ing model of plant and ani­mal cell.

Teach­ers used inter­ac­tive stu­dent jour­nals dur­ing teacher train­ing workshop.

Teacher builds class­room ter­rar­ium to teach about life sci­ence concepts.

Teach­ers stud­ied the Hibis­cus plants as well as the ani­mals that live on or near the Hibis­cus plants.

SB4, the bill on assess­ment and grad­u­a­tion require­ments passed in the Florida House and Sen­ate, and is now headed for Gov­er­nor Crist’s desk for approval. I see SB4 as a pos­i­tive stepin the right direc­tion for the state of Florida to insure that all of its stu­dents become sci­en­tific lit­er­ate cit­i­zens. Essen­tially the bill will elim­i­nate the Sci­ence FCAT at the high school level, and will be replaced by end of the course sci­ence and math exams. SB4 mod­i­fies the state’s present grad­u­a­tion require­ments of 3 sci­ence courses by requir­ing that one of them be a biol­ogy class and a sec­ond be either a chem­istry or physics class. A weak­ness in SB4 is the lack of address­ing the need for stu­dents to take an Earth and Space Sci­ence related course. Hope­fully, this weak­ness will be addressed in the near future. Oppo­nents of the bill argue that stu­dents not seek­ing to pur­sue higher edu­ca­tion or careers in sci­ence and math should not be expected to take addi­tional math and sci­ence courses. Unfor­tu­nately, the oppo­nents of this bill have yet to con­cep­tu­al­ize the “big pic­ture” which is, it’s irrel­e­vant whether a high school stu­dent has the desire to con­tinue onto col­lege or into a sci­ence or math related career or not. Every indi­vid­ual needs to be exposed to “more advanced” math and sci­ence courses so that when they do grad­u­ate from high school they are sci­en­tific lit­er­ate cit­i­zens. If Gov­er­nor Crist gives his seal of approval for SB4 I’m hop­ing that fund­ing is allo­cated for increased mean­ing­ful math, biol­ogy, and physics lab­o­ra­tory expe­ri­ences for the stu­dents. Sec­ondly, fund­ing for pro­vid­ing on-going, qual­ity math and sci­ence  pro­fes­sional staff devel­op­ment for the teach­ers will be essen­tial for the imple­men­ta­tion of SB4’s revised math and sci­ence grad­u­a­tion requirements.