Week 5: Lesson Plan and Rubric

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