Investigative Science, Science 201, Spring 2009

Instructor

Nathan Moore, Assistant Professor
Physics Department, Winona State University
Office: Pasteur 152
Office Hours: MWF 10-12, 2-3, TR 11-12, also by appointment
Email:
What I'm reading...
John Deming, Assistant Professor
Chemistry Department, Winona State University
Office: Pasteur 336
Office Hours: TBA
Email:
Web:
Bob Kopitzke, Assistant Professor
Chemistry Department, Winona State University
Office: Pasteur 310A
Office Hours: TBA
Email:
Web:

Course Text and Required Materials

Required: Physical Science And Everyday Thinking, Herff Jones. This is the main text that will use nearly every day in class.
Required: Lab Journal (a dedicated notebook for Scie 201, the bookstore has some available)
Optional: The Self Sufficient Life, by John Seymour. One of the most under-appreciated physics texts of the last 30 years, this book will supplement lectures and lab. For more on why I value this book, see the following historical article.
Optional: A text on Physics. Although the Physics covered in 201 has stayed pretty much the same for the last 150 years, and in a technical sense, most any Physics text will serve as a sufficient reference. Good intro-level texts include: The Feynmann Lectures, Matter and Interactions, I (Mechanics), Young and Freedman, Serway and Jewitt, and Halliday and Resnick.
Optional: General Chemistry by Linus Pauling, Dover, 1988. Pauling was awarded the Nobel Prize twice (Chemistry and Peace) and taught chemistry at a few Cal institutions. This intro-level text is less than $20 and serves as a great chemistry reference for the course. Most of the book is available online through Google Books.

Purpose of the Class and Learning Outcomes

The purpose of this class is to help you become familiar with the fundamentals of science in a manner that also prepares you to teach science in your future elementary classroom. It is important that elementary students be allowed and encouraged to explore their world and that teachers of students at this young age support their curiosity. Too many students come to college claiming to hate science. When pressed, many say that they had a miserable teacher in their K-12 years who didn’t answer their questions, or who made them memorize a textbook. Science is critically important and the best way to understand our world. We want the future teachers (of my children) to be enthusiastic about science so that their future students (my kids) will likewise be passionate about science.

Skill goals:

At the end of this course, students will be able to:

synthesize diverse information to draw reasonable scientific conclusions and to support those conclusions with evidence and scientific reasoning
solve simple mathematical problems
read, interpret and make graphs and diagrams
design, implement, and assess the effectiveness of science activities for elementary school children

Content Goals:

At the end of this course, students will be able to:

Make connections between the macroscopic and microscopic worlds.
Use ideas from physics and chemistry to create testable explanations of everyday phenomena.
Design and construct a simple experiment that can be completed in an elementary classroom.

Grading

Your grade for this course is based on the following:

Item / Fractional Weight
In-Class activities and homework / 0.2
Quizzes / 0.10
Chapter Exams / 0.40
Final (Physics portion) / 0.15
Final (Chemistry portion) / 0.15

The Physics final will come miday way through the semester. The Chemistry final will come at the end of the class during finals week.

University Studies

The purpose of the Natural Science requirement in the University Studies program is to provide students with the tools to understand and be able to apply the methods by which scientific inquiry increases our understanding of the natural world. Courses must be selected from an approved list; departments normally included in the Natural Sciences are Biology, Chemistry, Geoscience, and Physics.

These courses must include requirements and learning activities that promote students’ abilities to…

understand how scientists approach and solve problems in the natural sciences;
apply those methods to solve problems that arise in the natural sciences;
use inductive reasoning, mathematics, or statistics to solve problems in natural science;
engage in independent and collaborative learning;
identify, find, and use the tools of information science as it relates to natural science;
critically evaluate both source and content of scientific information; and
recognize and correct scientific misconceptions.

Courses that satisfy the laboratory requirement in the Natural Sciences will additionally provide students the opportunity to practice scientific inquiry through hands-on investigations and to analyze and report the results of those investigations.

Appropriate uses of technology during class/lab:

Cell phones must be turned off during class and labs. You are not allowed to send or receive text messages or phone calls during scheduled class time. Students doing so will be asked to leave class for the remainder of the period and will be unable to earn any points associated with all assessments given during that class period. If a pattern of behavior emerges (i.e., two or more infractions) the student forfeits his/her opportunity replace the lowest midterm exam percentage with his/her final exam percentage.
Laptop computers must have their screens closed during class unless specifically required to open them by the instructor. Students should plan for this and print out all materials, notes, etc in advance. Any student opening his/her laptop during class will be in trouble.

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The following is how the developers of our adopted curriculum describe the class.

STRUCTURE OF THE PSET COURSE:

This is an activity-based and discussion-oriented course with four major goals:

(1) Physical Science Content: To help you develop a deep understanding of physics and chemistry ideas that can be used to explain interesting phenomena, and are related to the ideas included in the elementary school science curriculum;

(2) Nature of Science: To help you practice and develop an understanding of how knowledge is developed within a scientific community: that doing science involves using evidence and creative thinking, that knowledge is established through collaboration and consensus, and that science knowledge can change over time;

(3) Elementary Students’ Ideas: To help you understand the thinking of elementary school children by observing (via video) and analyzing their discourse when they are in the process of learning science.

(4) Learning about learning: To help you become more aware of how your own science ideas change and develop over time, and how the structure of the learning environment and curriculum facilitate these changes.

There will be very little formal lecturing in this course. Indeed, all class sessions will take place in the lab. The basic aim of the PSET format is to allow you to take charge of your own learning, with the instructor as a guide. During class you will spend most of your time performing experiments, working occasionally with computers, and discussing ideas with your classmates. We expect you to continue your learning at home through a series of carefully designed homework assignments, many involving use of the web. We hope you will find many of our teaching and learning strategies valuable and appropriate for you to use when you begin your teaching career.

The PSET curriculum is divided into the following chapters:

Chapter 1: Interactions and Energy

Chapter 2: Interactions and Forces

Chapter 3: Interactions and Systems

Chapter 4: Interactions and the Behavior of Gases

Chapter 5: Interactions and Physical Changes

Chapter 6: Interactions and Chemical Changes

The goal of each chapter is to have you develop a set of ideas that can be used to help explain phenomena that will be explored within that chapter, as well as to consider issues of learning science. There are three types of activities and homeworks within each chapter. The first several activities are called Developing Ideas activities. During these activities you will perform experiments to collect evidence in support of ideas that you will develop. The final activity in a Chapter is an Applying Ideas activity. In that activity you will compare your ideas with those developed by scientists, then apply the ideas to explain interesting phenomena. Sprinkled throughout the curriculum are a series of Learning About Learning activities, some done during class, most done for homework. During these LAL activities you are asked to think about your own learning, the learning of children and/or the learning of scientists (namely, how they develop scientific knowledge).

STRUCTURE OF THE PSET ACTIVITIES

Each individual activity consists of several sections with slightly different aims.

Purpose

A short introduction describing the aims of the activity and how it ties in to the topic. It also poses the key question(s) for the activity.

Initial Ideas

Questions that give you a chance to express your own initial ideas on the topic of the activity, before you do any experiments. These initial ideas are important, as they will form the basis on which you build further understanding.

Collecting and Interpreting Evidence

Here’s where you do the experiments and record your predictions, observations and data that provide the evidence to support or refute your ideas.

Summarizing Questions

Working together, the whole class will try to summarize what they have learned in the activity by answering a few questions. You will hand in your responses to all these questions at the end of each chapter (on the day of the test). You will receive up to 5 points per chapter, graded on completeness.

Throughout the activities you will be writing answers to questions on the activity sheets themselves. Three types of questions will be identified by small icons:

Prediction Question. A chance for you to use your current thinking to anticipate what you think will happen. In each case, your prediction should be justified in terms of your current idea(s). This is a vital step in your learning and should not be “glossed over”. If the results of an experiment do not agree with your prediction DO NOT go back and change it – this is valuable evidence of how your ideas are evolving.

Observation Question: A place for you to record the results of experiments. These results may take several forms, including describing observations, sketching diagrams, or recording numerical values in a table.

Making Sense Question. This is where you get to interpret the results of experiments in terms of your ideas. Do the results agree with your predictions, or not? If so, they provide evidence to support your ideas. If not, maybe your ideas need to be modified.

REQUIRED MATERIALS:

Physical Science and Everyday Thinking, Chapters is available from xxxxx. A PSET Student Resources CD is included as part of the materials. On this CD are Microsoft Wordcopies of all the homework assignments, including videos (and transcripts) of children engaged in learning science. Other course materials will be distributed to you as needed during the course.

It is strongly recommend that you purchase a 3-ring binder to hold the PSET curriculum materials.

ATTENDANCE AND PARTICIPATION:

You will be primarily responsible for your own learning in this class. By engaging in meaningful discussions with your group members, by actively participating in whole class discussions, and by performing interesting experiments, you will develop with your classmates a set of ideas. Similar to the way in which scientists develop ideas, your ideas will be based on evidence gathered from the experiments you do. At appropriate times, you will be able to compare your ideas with those developed by scientists. It is expected that except for some special jargon, the ideas you develop with the class should be quite similar to the scientists’ ideas.

Because you will play such an important role in your own learning, and especially the learning of your classmates, you are expected to come to class on time every class period and participate throughout the period. Class will begin sharply at xxx. You will receive one participation point for each class fully attended. If you are absent or more than 20 minutes late for class, you will not receive the participation credit for that day. If you do miss class, you should discuss what you missed with another student. You can come early to the following class to try to make up some of the hands on experiments.

HOMEWORK:

Homework will be assigned almost every class period and, unless otherwise stated, will be due at the beginning of the following class period. Several homework assignments will require you to run computer simulations on the web. The PSET simulator index page is at If you do not bring your homework to class, I will accept it as an e-mail attachment no later than midnight on the day it is due. (Electronic copies are available on the PSET Student Resources CD) No credit will be given if the homework in not turned in by then. If you are absent, you need to contact a fellow student to find out about the homework. On the second day after the homework is due I will post answers on the web at Each regular assignment is worth 2 points and will be graded according to whether you provided reasonable answers to all the questions.

For certain homework assignments you will be watching video and analyzing children’s thinking. (We can refer to these as “Children’s Ideas Homework.”) Each of these assignments will be worth 5 points: 2 points assigned for completeness, and 3 points for how well you support claims you make about the children’s ideas. You need to cite appropriate sections from the transcript and clearly explain how the transcript evidence supports your claims.

PSET Course Information Page 1