Teaching sequence

Work through this resource material in the following sequence:

15 minutes

Tune in: What is a plan and why is it important?

30 minutes

Find out: How to plan an investigation

30 minutes

Take action: Plan your own investigation

5 minutes

Reflection

We recommend you complete the previous lessons in this unit prior to this lesson.

Tune in: What is a plan, and why is it important?

Step 1.

Use this step if you have time and want to touch on the importance of teamwork and working with different people with different skills.

Listen to the MOAH Sea the Weed podcast from 12:30 - 17:02 mins

The transcript for this section can be found on the student worksheet. This part of the podcast pulls together all of the relevant people to design the hoodie that will be used to raise awareness for the coastline reforestation project. This includes:

AIME
Damon Gameau (2040 Filmmaker)
Operation Crayweed (The scientists regrowing the forest)
Pyratex (The seaweed fibre company)
Surfers for Climate
High school students

Ask students:

What can they hear is happening?
What is the benefit of having all of the stakeholders involved in the design and planning of the hoodie?

Explain to students that today's lesson is about planning their experiment. One of the main aspects of the Making of a Hoodie podcast is bringing together people with unlikely connections to use their expertise, passion and knowledge to develop far-reaching ideas. Your students are working in groups to develop their social change experiment. It is rare for anyone to conduct any type of research or investigation completely alone.

Ask students:

What the benefits of working in groups might be?
How might working with people they don’t normally work with influence the planning and conducting of their investigation?

Step 2.

Ask students to head to the AIME website to read about how the Sea Weed hoodie happened?

This story is also available on the Student Worksheet if device use is not available.

Ask students:

What is the overall goal of the Sea Weed Hoodie?
- Suggested response: AIME has the overall goal of creating a case study for how we can reforest the sea all around the world.
What are the steps in their plan to make this happen?
How does a plan enable AIME to achieve its goal?

Find out: How to plan an investigation

Step 1.

Explain to students that they will be learning about the importance of planning an investigation and how this should be represented in a scientific report.

Explain that any scientific report should follow the standard format. This Scientific Report Format factsheet shows the standard format and can be distributed to students if required. If you have been through the creation of a scientific report before, you may just like to remind students of the sections and their content.

Step 2.

Invite students to rewrite the two statements below to be more appropriate for inclusion in a scientific report.

Explain that a good scientific report will use formal writing with a passive voice in the third person. This style of writing is meant to be objective. This allows a focus on the content and not on the writer. A scientific report should also be written in the past tense.

‘We surveyed 50 people to find out their recycling habits’
- Correct style: “50 people were surveyed to determine their recycling habits.”
‘We found that 45% of students buy their clothes from op shops.’
- Correct style: ‘It was found that 45% of students purchase their clothing secondhand.’

Step 3.

Explain to students that the aim of an experiment is a brief statement about the purpose of their experiment and explains what they hope to achieve. A good way to start writing an aim is to start it with ‘To determine…’

Ask students to write an aim for an investigation that focuses on the following question.

Question: Does raising awareness about recycling within Year 8 increase the rate at which students use the correct bins?
Aim: To determine whether raising awareness about recycling among Year 8 students through the use of a social media campaign can positively influence the rate at which these students use the correct bins for their waste.

Step 4.

After the research question, hypothesis, and aim have been formulated, the next step is to plan how the investigation will take place. By this stage in an investigation, students should be aware of what they are hoping to achieve. Knowing what you want to achieve helps you to realise what data you need to collect in order to prove your hypothesis.

Ask students what they would need to find out in an investigation to answer the question below. Invite them to respond to this question on their student worksheet.

Does raising awareness about recycling within Year 8 increase the rate at which students use the correct bins?

Possible responses:

Need data about the use of recycling bins from before and after the experiment
Need a way to raise awareness about recycling that reaches all of Year 8 students
Need a way of determining how effective the awareness-raising was

Ask students how knowing this is the outcome could assist them in planning the investigation.

Possible Responses:

Design a survey about how students are using bins and give this to students at the beginning of the investigation and then after the awareness campaign
Conduct an audit of the recycling bins in the school to see their contents before and after the campaign. This could be a bit messy!
Design a survey to determine what students have learnt and what they will implement from the campaign.

Step 5.

Explain to students that once they have thought about their own investigation (e.g. What data do they need to be able to achieve their hypothesis?), they will be able to plan their investigation in much more detail. A good start can be to plan what the results section will look like, so they can get a better idea of how they will need to conduct the experiment to get the results they want.

A good plan will include:

Detailed materials and equipment
- A list of all of the resources students will need to conduct the investigation
Detailed method
- A numbered list of the steps they will need to undertake the investigation in the right order
A plan for collecting results
- In order to make sure students collect results that are useful, it is important for them to think about what results would be useful to them and how they would like this to be displayed.

If students are unsure of the amount of detail they should include in their experiment, remind them that any person in their year level should be able to pick up their scientific report and conduct it exactly the same way they did.

To illustrate this, you could use the example of the recycling question above.

Prompt students with questions like:
- What information do you need?
- What type of data will you collect?
- How do you want to visualise it?
- How can you make it clear and concise?

Step 6.

Ask students to draft a table on their devices so they can quickly add, remove and merge columns as their thinking becomes clear. As they make a plan for their results, they should start to see how they should construct their method and what they need to do to actually collect this information.

When creating these tables, draw students' attention to the correct labelling of tables/graphs in the results section. They should be labelled as - Table X. Short, concise summary of the information presented. For example, Table 2. Content of recycling bins in Year 8 Area

Refer to the Teacher Content Information for examples of results tables that could be used.

Take Action: Plan your own investigation

Depending on how you are using this lesson, this section could take multiple forms.

If you are using this lesson for students to follow the process of designing an experiment to ignite change, each Take Action at the end of the lesson will correspond to forming a different section of their overall experiment. This first Take Action will focus on them planning an investigation.

You could choose for students to develop their own experiments, or you could conduct one experiment as a class, and each student could write their own report.

This is an alternative approach to teaching the scientific method that could result in some social change within your class or school community. Consider spending some time thinking about ways your class could create change within your community and encourage students to think creatively about how they could make a positive impact and measure it. If you want to focus on the scientific method more, we would suggest focusing on a class or year-level change through one experiment.

Some possible examples could be:

Does raising awareness about recycling within Year 8 increase the rate at which students use the correct bins?
Does an awareness campaign about fast fashion influence the clothing choices of Year 8 students?

Step 1.

Divide students back into their groups from the last lesson or allocate them to groups of 3-4.

Using the information you have covered about planning an experiment, ask the students to write a plan, including the aim, materials, method and results for their own social change experiment that you decided upon in the last lesson.

You can choose to give students the appropriate amount of time – we would recommend at least another 30 minutes in another lesson depending on the level of detail you want in the plan. Encourage students to consider the best methods to generate their data and how this should be represented.

Support students to plan out their questions and approach. If students are designing surveys, they will think carefully about the kinds of questions they are asking, ensuring they are considering the impact of bias and not directing the participant in a certain direction. Students developing open-ended questions will need to test their questions to ensure they provide sufficient scope for depth and variance.

Students can use a template such as the one available in the Student Worksheet to help them with planning before incorporating it into their report.

My research questions are:
My research method is:
I will collect qualitative/quantitative (select one) data using:
- surveys/interviews/questionnaires/tests/scales (select one or two)
I will analyse my data by:
My independent variable is:
My dependent variables are:
My controlled variables are:
I will collect data about:

Step 2.

Have each group share their plans and discuss them.

Which plans are clear and easily achievable?
What are some positive aspects of the plans?
Will you be able to collect those results in an appropriate time frame?

After your discussion, you might like to choose one or blend a few plans together for your whole class experiment.

Reflection

Ask students to read the following quote on their worksheets and discuss what it means about planning for an investigation using the scientific method.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

Planning a Scientific Experiment

Go to

Summary

Learning intentions:

Students will...

Success criteria:

Students can...

Lesson Guides and Printables

Lesson Details

Curriculum Mapping

Resources Required

Additional Info

In this lesson