Bill Robertson, Ph.D. - Classes
Teacher Education Department

MSED 4311 - Teaching Science in Intermediate and Middle Grades - Final Assignment

Task

You are tasked with designing, developing, and reflecting on a series of appropriate grade level science activities as part of a thematic unit that focuses on specific concepts found in science, and providing a detailed write up of this assignment following the guidelines of the provided rubric. This paper and its presentation will be your Final assignment. The purpose is to have you demonstrate an understanding of the methods associated with inquiry based science that is appropriate for your current classroom. You should plan to include pedagogical techniques including Socratic questioning, cooperative grouping, constructivism and other methods within the content of your paper.

You will also need to submit all your material that you include in your thematic unit here in the format of a document. You must follow the format of the provided template and address all areas within your final document. Assignments that are documents should be turned in as attachments in either a .doc or .rtf format.

Product – Design, Development, and Reflection

The thematic unit that you present must focus on specific concepts in science and should be an example of a series of activities you could utilize within a thematic unit. For your sample activity, you should include a title for your activity, provide a brief introduction (or hook) to engage the learner, provide step by step instructions for doing the activity, and provide extension explorations and questions that engage the learner in making connections to real world situations. You should identify the titles of other appropriate activities, but do not need to fully develop them as activities for this assignment. Additionally, you will provide a presentation plan for students to demonstrate their learning and a plan for how the assessment will be carried out in class. Finally, you will need to address the reflective questions in which you will demonstrate your thorough understanding of the content and connections from this course.

PowerPoint Presentation

In addition, you will develop a MS PowerPoint presentation to share with the instructor and with the class. You must have the following slides along with your content information: title slide, purpose, summary and references. You should have between 8-10 total slides. For each PPT slide, use a bulleted approach with a good layout that is clear and understandable and that provides purposeful content from which to present. You will attach this presentation file as a separate file (.ppt) along with your document and submit both files for your final project grade.

Evaluation

The evaluation for your Final grade will be a combination of your written product that you develop and your PowerPoing presentation. There will be a rubric that will be used for the evaluation of the written product and the presentation materials. The final score that you receive will be out of a total of 160 possible points.