Designing your activity for astroEDU

This is a short guide to help you design your astronomy education activity and prepare to submit it to astroEDU (based on Strubbe, 2012).

"Backwards Design"

Education research indicates that effective activities should be "backwards-designed." That means, instead of first coming up with what the teacher and students will do, and then deciding what the goals of the activity are, you'll write a more effective activity if you do things in the other order: first design your goals, learning objectives, and evaluation plan, and then design your activity to support these goals. Here's the idea in more detail:

1. Decide on clear overall goals and state why they are important for students to learn. More info on designing goals is below.
2. Decide on specific learning objectives: what do you want students to know / understand / do / feel after having finished the activity? And what evidence would tell you that your learners are reaching these objectives? (e.g., the students ask their own questions in class; they get particular questions right on a test; they state a desire to take more science classes next year)
3. Design your activity to help your learners achieve these goals, and including places for you to assess their progress during and after the activity.
4. During and after the activity, evaluate how well your learners have achieved your goals. A rubric can be a useful tool for evaluating student learning.
5. If your learners did not achieve your goals at the level you intended, use what you learned about your students to revise the activity, for next time, so that it supports them further in reaching your goals.

Designing activity goals

There are three distinct types of goals to consider: scientific content, scientific practices, and scientific attitudes. Consider your audience and what their background is, and how you would like your learners' understanding, abilities and thinking to change as a result of the activity.

Scientific content: What do we want students to know or understand?

e.g., "The Moon appears to go through phases because of how much of the Moon's illuminated face we see from Earth as the Moon orbits around us each month."

Consider choosing:

• big-picture topics that are of long-lasting importance,
• concepts that involve explanations, rather than just vocabulary or phenomenology, such as "... happens because ...",
• topics related to everyday observations students can make,
• topics that are "cool" that can inspire students, even if these are hard for students to understand at any deep level (e.g., black holes)
• topics where research is ongoing, to let students in on the mystery-solving aspect of real scientific research

Scientific practices

What do you want your students to be able to do, how do you want to affect their thinking, and what skills do you want them to develop? These aspects are important in helping all students think scientifically about the world, whether or not they pursue careers in science. A framework for enumerating scientific practices (from the U.S.’s Next Generation Science Standards; NRC 2012) is:

• Asking questions
• Developing and using models
• Planning and carrying out investigations
• Analysing and interpreting data
• Using mathematics and computational thinking
• Constructing explanations
• Engaging in argument from evidence
• Communicating information

Scientific attitudes:

Educational activities can affect how students (and perhaps even their teachers) feel about science and education: Example goals: Students feel...

• inspired to pursue their education
• inspired to study science further
• inspired to become an astronomer
• connected to their culture's astronomical discoveries
• more curious and interested in observing the world around them
• empowered to ask why about science observations, and beyond, in their lives
• empowered to figure things out for themselves
• connected to (and respectful of) people from very different backgrounds from themselves (getting perspective from the smallness of the planet and the vastness of the cosmos)

Inquiry-based learning

Inquiry-based learning is a powerful means for students to learn both scientific content and scientific reasoning together. Essential parts of inquiry are students learning science in ways that mirror authentic scientific research practices, developing explanations, and having ownership over the path of their learning. We encourage you to consider ways to incorporate inquiry into your activity, and have prepared some additional information about inquiry-based learning.

Other tips to help your resource to be used widely:

• Students may have prior knowledge (correct or incorrect) about the topic of your activity. Include explicit ways to draw out students' prior knowledge, and ways that will allow them to explore preconceptions.
• Consider ways for students with different levels of background knowledge or ability to benefit from the activity: e.g., provide opportunities for different starting/ending points in an investigation; different ways to demonstrate learning (writing, speaking, drawing).
• Avoid using colloquial language or technical jargon.

Suggested further reading below.

If you have suggestions of other resources we should include, please send us an email!

• Chinn C. A., & Malhotra, B. A. 2002, Epistemologically Authentic Inquiry in Schools: A Theoretical Framework for Evaluating Inquiry Tasks, Science Education, 86, 175
• National Research Council (NRC) 2000, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press).
• National Research Council (NRC) 2007, "Chapter 2: Four Strands of Science Learning." Ready, Set, SCIENCE!: Putting Research to Work in K-8 Science Classrooms. (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press).
• Wiggins G., & McTighe, J. 2005, Understanding by Design. (Alexandria: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development).