Didactic guide for teachers

Didactic Goals

The didactic sequence dealing with evolution, this activity pretends students to:

• Understand scientific knowledge as a knowledge permanently under construction.
• Learn to compare differences and similarities between species in order to propose an evolutionary path to explain the observations.
• Communicate scientific data in scientific formats.
• Analyze stratigraphic faunistic successions and stablishing age relationships.
• Apply evolution models to the explanation of evidences.

Indications to apply the activity

• Don't explain anything to your students. They will be able to learn it alone. Just let them work, and observe their discussions. You'll have the opportunity to collect the explanations after and from their work.
• Let them talk between them, even between the different teams. Science is a social process. Scientists don't call it copying or cheating. They call it constructing knowledge, and it usually happens in congresses and seminars.
• Ask your students to think. Explain them you expect their best.

About IBSE (Inquiry-Based Science Education)

Some of the principles of IBSE used to build this site and didactic activity:

• Scientists generate scientific theories based on evidence, but they do not find definitive answers. Real science has not a book of "correct answers" were you can contrast if your conclusions are correct. "Correct processes" and "Best explanations" is the most you can get in real science. It's why answers have been supressed from all the documents given here. Of course you or your students can look for it through internet. Discourage them to do so: in fact, nobody worries about the real evolutionary history of Caminalcules. Remember, they are imaginary. The important thing is your process.
• Scientific knowledge and ideas change over time and are open to further revision as our understanding of the world around us evolves. Education doesn't mean to transmit a false feeling of certainty. Education means to teach how to deal with uncertainty, to take decisions and assume risks. Don't confirm them if they have the correct answer or not. In case of misunderstandings, just ask them if their process is correct and their results coherent. Answer with questions to their questions, or help them to make better questions. "Correct solutions" or "Wise teachers" won't be present in their life for ever. Teach them how to arrange without it.
  • Science is a social and creative activity. Constructing and testing hypothesis, interpreting data from different formats and adjusting an abstract model as a consequence, identifying patterns and stablishing relationships, discussing results and justifying conclusions, are key competences that science learning must include as a priority, not only to make them best scientists, but to make them critical citizens.

Calendar and Sessions

The proposed Calendar assume 1h-length sessions, and that no homework will be given. Following the standards of the "flipped classrom" you could tell students to study the theoretical and historic aspects of evolution, and use the whole sessions as experimental practice work.

• The Challenges section can be used as an evaluation tool if you ask them to do it individually. A part from the information needed, data contain other significative aspects not directly related. Lots of scientific discoverings are originated as laterall, unexpected results of research. One additional unexpected result that puts in discussion data from Step 1 and 2 should be obtained in the Challenge section.
  • In the poster session, each team presents its Challenge. The observation of all the independent results should originate a new view of the results of the Challenges, as a new family inside Caminalcules should appear (this result is only atainable when all the Challenges are observed toghether). This is a metaphor of the constructing-knowledge nature of science.

Examples of students' productions

(only for Xtec users. If you are a teacher, and you want to have access to this ressource, contact me from your institutional web adress-in order to confirm you are a teacher-).

An image of one of the Posters performed by the students is available to download.

An image of the phylogenetic tree performed by the students is available to download

A video ( in Catalan) where students explain their participation in the activity and the organization of the Caminalcules Scientific Congress http://youtu.be/nP7bjLAbITA

Attention to diversity

• Step four can be supressed.
• Stratigraphy can be supressed from the didactic sequence by giving the students the ages lacking in the fossil list.
  • Students cap skip firts step: the phylogeny activity will work anyway, even if the contrast between taxonomy and phylogeny (interesting point) will be lost.
  • A spanish-version of the site is under construction and will be soon available.

CLIL/Aicle

This site has been built from a didactic activity performed with spanish students, and in some steps, liguistic clues are given. I'm yet working on this aspect.

Hints and Ideas for further development

The Additional tasks section contains other activities that can be proposed or choosen by the students. Some hints to develop new activities:

Ideas proposed by Dr. Cristian Cañestro, researcher at Departametn de Genètica, Universitat de Barcelona.

• As performed in step four, ages of some fossils can be masked also in step three. Using C14-simulated data could be an interesting point to make students discover the age of these fossils.
  • Including geographic constraints (species habitating in differents parts of the world) would originate different phylogenetic trees, with no modification of the taxonomy.
  • Edit the faunistic successions in order to include faults modifying the order of the strata. Using guide-fossils to help the identification of the strata.

References

• Classification and Evolution Document has been modified from an original file from the Biology 10 Lab Manual Project, from Harris, K. (2010). [http://www.hartnell.edu/faculty/kharris/bio10labmanual/]
• Gendron, R. P. (2000) The classification and evolution of Caminalcules. The american biology teacher, 62, 8 570-576
  • Sokal, R.R. (1983). A phylogenetic analysis of the Caminalcules. I. The data base. Systematic Zoology, 32, 159–184.