HR: 0830h
AN: ED51C-1207    [PDF]
TI: Using backward design in NASA educational resources
AU: * Peticolas, L M
EM: laura@ssl.berkeley.edu
AF: Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley 7 Gauss Way, Berkeley, CA 94720-7450 United States
AU: Mendez, B
EM: bmendez@ssl.berkeley.edu
AF: Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley 7 Gauss Way, Berkeley, CA 94720-7450 United States
AU: Schultz, G
EM: schultz@ssl.berkeley.edu
AF: Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley 7 Gauss Way, Berkeley, CA 94720-7450 United States
AU: Luhmann, J G
EM: jgluhman@ssl.berkeley.edu
AF: Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley 7 Gauss Way, Berkeley, CA 94720-7450 United States
AU: Craig, N
EM: ncraig@ssl.berkeley.edu
AF: Space Sciences Laboratory, University of California at Berkeley 7 Gauss Way, Berkeley, CA 94720-7450 United States
AB: It is important to create NASA educational resources that are effective in imparting deep understanding of space physics concepts, which link to main ideas outlined in the National Science Education Standards (NSES). One way of ensuring success in such a task is to use the backward design philosophy described in the book, "Understanding by Design" by Wiggins and McTighe. Using this design philosophy together with inquiry-based activities, we have developed a teacher's magnetism guide with three main lessons. The goal of this teacher's guide is to help middle school kids learn about motions and forces, magnetism, including electromagnetism, science as inquiry, and science as a human endeavor. We reach these goals in part by using the story of the NASA STEREO Mission together with the design process of the STEREO-IMPACT magnetic boom. We found that using a backward design guarantees that our activities teach the ideas we want the students to learn and also that the lessons include a variety of assessment and evaluation tools along the way. However, we also found that it is difficult to implement the backward design without a long lesson using several assessment tools. This could be a problem for teachers who may not be able to use such time-consuming NASA activities and tools in their classroom. In this presentation, we will further discuss the ideas of backward design in the context of the three activities we created, and the benefits and difficulties we encountered using this philosophy.
UR: http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/impact
DE: 0600 ELECTROMAGNETICS
DE: 2134 Interplanetary magnetic fields
DE: 6605 Education
DE: 7524 Magnetic fields
DE: 7594 Instruments and techniques
SC: Education and Human Resources [ED]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting