EDD 480 Teaching Science in the Secondary Grade

For this project, I researched and explored the 5Es Instructional Model. This instructional style uses five steps to captivate students in learning: engagement, exploration, explanation, elaboration, and evaluation. In this lesson, I encouraged students to begin to question why they look different from each other. We then dive into differences within families, using a pair of fraternal twins as an example. Through an online laboratory and discussion, students begin to form their own ideas on the genetics of inheritance and are ultimately able to apply that knowledge through Punnett squares. Overall, this lesson plan is a representation of the 5Es instructional model and how it can be applied in the classroom.

Often, educators jump directly into teaching without asking students what they already know. This means that we educators sometime ignore any misconceptions students may hold regarding content. This is a crucial error, because research shows that if misconceptions are not addressed, students will distort newly taught information to fit the context of their misconceptions. In some cases, they will develop elaborate mechanisms in order to justify their misconceptions. In this project, I explored research on misconceptions and how it affects student learning. All in all, research shows that (although it is time consuming) identifying and addressing misconceptions is critical to allow students to construct firm, foundation groundings of knowledge.