EDUC 5305 Curriculum Design, Implementation,

and Evaluation

Module 2 Assignment: Analysis of Lab Activity

Submit Assignment by 11:59 p.m., Sunday.
Candidate:

Alyssa Church

Grade Level/Subject Area:

Date:

4/16/2016

6th, Math

Overview: Analysis of Lab Activity

The lab activity you did along with the children in the video, Circles in the Sky, was part of an
entire inquiry-based Learning Cycle. Review the procedures and guiding questions again, then
answer these questions regarding the theoretical research base of the activity.
For each question, support your response with specific examples in the activity document and/or
resulting behaviors from you or the students you observed in the video.

Part 1: Connections
How does this Learning Cycle reflect the nature of science? (Be specific!)
The nature of science is to be interactive and dynamic. According to Einstein on page 3 of our textbook
The Learning Cycle, the object of science is to coordinate our experiences and bring them into a
logical system. In other words, science is designed to let us interact with our surroundings, and then take
those interactions and observations and make connections to the rest of our world and what we know. In
this activity, we were directly experimenting with science and seeing what happened when we did
different things to the air temperature in the bottle. When we first heated the bottle and saw that the penny
moved, we could understand that the warm air was expanding and rising, causing the penny to pop up
over the lip of the bottle. Our reactions to the penny moving (realizing that it was a scientific
phenomenon and not magic) added to our concept understanding. With that knowledge we could then
extend our understanding with the ice and hot water portion of the experiment. We saw that warm air was
trying to escape the bottle, and then when we put the balloon on top we could continue our understanding
to say that the warm air was rising.

How does this Learning Cycle reflect the purpose of schools? (Be specific!)
The purpose of schools is to create independent thinkers. The experiment was mostly student led, with
guiding questions from the teacher in the video. The questions were designed to have the students come
to their own conclusions, and at no point did the teacher tell them that warm air rose and cold air sunk,
and then to just passively watch it happen afterwards. In a traditional lecture class the students would not
be able to experience this scientific phenomenon of air rising and sinking. Students here had to draw their
own conclusions based on their observations, which is an important skill to being an independent
thinking processing and applying knowledge rather than just hearing it.

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EDUC 5305 Curriculum Design, Implementation,

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How does this Learning Cycle reflect the way children learn? (Be specific!)
Children learn in a three stage process, acquiring new information, being at a sense of disequilibrium, and
then assimilating that knowledge to further levels. As was already mentioned, these students explored an
idea first, and were able to observe the physical reaction of air being warmed and rising up and out of the
bottle. Once that experiment was continued to include the ice and hot water, students needed to sort
through the new information that they had gathered to understand why the balloon did what it did. With
the guiding questions by the teacher, students were able to conclude that the hot air was rising and the
cool air was sinking. In an additional cycle, the teacher then asked more probing questions to see if they
could extend this information to apply to more life questions. One that had never occurred to me was why
hot air balloons take off during dusk or dawn. With the new understanding of how the balloon was being
filled it should be a quick jump to understanding the take-off times of the hot air balloons, and why that
would have to be the case. This modeled the cycle of learning best by achieving the information,
grappling with what the new information is, how it can be applied and why it makes sense, and then
moving on with that new piece of information. This experiment has helped me to make a lot of
connections between air convection and currents in the rest of my life why water physically boils up
when it gets heated, and wondering about the striation of heated air in rooms to determine what the best
height of furniture would be to stay cool how varied is the difference of temperatures in a standard
room?

Part 2: Reflections
How might this concept have been taught in a traditional manner? (Be specific!)
In a traditional manner the teacher may have assigned a reading, or just lectured on the action of air
currents. There may have been an old, outdated video shown that reflects air currents with those colored
arrows, followed by surface level questions about what warm air does and what cold air does. It is
possible that a good set of questions would include a question such as where do we see this process take
place in life, but that is not a guarantee. This does not allow students to actually experience what
happens when air warms or cools, and so is less powerful as a lesson.

Write at least two reflective statements about how you could use this activity with your students.
This lesson would be helpful when teaching about weather and air currents, and explaining about fronts
and why warm fronts and cold fronts create extreme weather when they meet. This can also show about
the forming of clouds, especially in the summer warm air rises and condenses when it cools, forming
clouds but not violent weather.
Warm air rising can also make some connections about multi story buildings or houses which floor
would be the hottest and why? What would the air patterns look like in a room with a fan on? Is this
pattern (of warm substances rises and cool substances cooling) seen in any other form, such as water?
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EDUC 5305 Curriculum Design, Implementation,

and Evaluation
Could this partially explain why the surface of bodies of water are cooler than the deeper layers?

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