Air Pressure Curriculum

Introduction

Having Students Model Their Ideas

Throughout this module, students are asked to model their ideas. This is a critical part of the pedagogy of the unit and it serves multiple purposes:

• It helps students get in touch with their own thinking.
• It helps students become invested in the questions under consideration.
• It helps each student prepare his or her ideas so that he or she feels more prepared to participate in the group discussion.
• It helps teachers be aware of what students are thinking.
• It helps teachers and students see how students' ideas evolve over the course of the module.
• It underscores the importance of coming up with increasingly explanatory models. Scientists critique and discard models in an effort to find those models that have the most explanatory power. Students learn an important lesson about how knowledge is generated in science.

The teachers who tested this module had students create models in their journals, on individual whiteboards, on paper, and on the whiteboards in front of the class.