Backward Design
Lesson on Human Impact on Water Quality
Desired Learning
Outcomes
·
Identify the key factors that influence water
quality.
• Explain how human activities can alter the balance of a
water ecosystem and affect the survival of organisms.
• Identify the relationships among factors affecting water
quality.
• Explain how a factor affects the living organisms in a
water ecosystem.
• Use credible cyber resources for data collection.
• Use ICTs to facilitate the process of identifying
scientifically testable questions and locating valuable and accurate
information.
• Use ICTs to support data organization, data analysis, and
data presentation, and draw conclusions.
• Use ICTs to communicate findings to the learning community
using various media formats.
Acceptable Evidence
• Students will analyze and interpret data to provide
evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations
of organisms in an ecosystem.
• Students will construct an explanation that predicts
patterns of interactions among organisms across multiple ecosystems.
• Students will construct an argument supported by empirical
evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem
affect populations.
Learning Activities
Day 1
·
Students
will work in small groups and come up with lists of factors affecting water
quality and human activities that change the balance of water ecosystems.
·
Each group will use the Google News search
engine to find an article about water quality and its effects on a living
organism.
·
Students will research the direct or indirect
impact of human behaviors on the water ecosystems.
·
Students will cite the sources of the news articles
they found on the internet and write a concluding statement to support the
scientific explanations or arguments of the articles.
·
Each group will do an oral report on its
concluding statements to and discuss its findings with the rest of the class.
Day 2
·
Students will collect their own data about the
two factors affecting water quality, and use a spreadsheet to enter the
dissolved-oxygen and water-temperature data collected.
·
Students should use the charting feature of a
spreadsheet to create a chart demonstrating the correlation between dissolved
oxygen and water temperature, and explain how the chart helps them answer the
research question.
·
Students will discuss alternative explanations
if the pattern does not stay consistent and what other factors could affect the
relationship between dissolved oxygen and water.
·
Students will make connections to the essential
understanding of how human behaviors (e.g., human waste, dams) might affect
dissolved oxygen or water temperature, thus affecting water quality.
Day 3
·
The teacher will work with students to develop
scientifically researchable questions that can be answered using the data from
cyber data- bases and formulate the hypotheses.
·
Students will use the appropriate cyber data-
bases to collect data, use a spreadsheet to enter data, analyze data, create
charts, examine their hypotheses, and draw conclusions.
·
Students will complete a lab report that documents
the research question, hypothesis, research procedure, data analysis, and
conclusions, and incorporate graphs, charts, or images to support their
arguments.
·
Students will discuss their individual research
findings with the class to discover the different perspectives and prior
knowledge each student brings to the research.
Day 4
·
Students will work independently or in groups to
identify a scientifically testable question, formulate a hypothesis, develop a research
plan, collect and analyze data, evaluate the data, and draw conclusions.
·
Students will share their own investigation
findings and explanations and discuss the interesting aspects of their
projects, as well as what they learned from their peers’ reports.
Link to my rubric: https://w.taskstream.com/RubricWizard/RubricPrintView/PrintView?encLegacyRubricId=fczjzozkzlznzbzh&platform=LAT
