ASSIGNMENT
Suppose that you are a tenured faculty member in science education at a prestigious university. You previously received a small grant from the National Science Foundation to create and demonstrate how you would use innovative technologies to support the implementation of next generation science standards at the 8th grade level. Your first project focused on the use of inexpensive 3D printers (digital fabricators) in support of a unit of instruction that involved electro-magnestism intended to be aligned with the following standard (see www.nextgenscience.org): Motions and Stability: Forces and Interaction. Determine the factors that affect the strength of electric and magnetic forces. Examples of devices that use electric and magnetic forces include electromagnets, electric motors, or generators. Examples of data include the effect of the number of turns of wire on the strength of an electromagnet, or the effect of increasing the number or strength of magnets on the speed of an electric motor. Assessment about questions that require quantitative answers is limited to proportional reasoning and algebraic thinking.
The initial project involves groups of six students at four different schools in different school districts working for one month during the summer vacation. Students were recommended by their principals and participated on a voluntary basis without incentives other than the opportunity to work on an interesting project. Student groups were given access to a digital fabricator and both a content specialist (Ph.D. in science or engineering education) and a technical specialist along with the specifications for a general-purpose electric motor and appropriate support materials. Students had the task of constructing a working motor and testing its performance with variations in wiring and location of magnets. All four student groups succeeded in building and testing the motor and reported their findings to the involved project faculty. Students also complete a standardized test based on understanding of the underlying principles of magnetism and the electric motors. All students scored very high on that test and reported high enthusiasm for the project on an end-of-task survey.
You are now developing a proposal for a follow-on scale-up grant to NSF to extend your findings with these four groups of students to the four different school districts that they represented. The effort will involve all 8th-grade science classes in the four districts, and all units of instruction related to electric and magnetic forces. One part of your proposal involves an implementation plan in which you are specifying the issues involved in scaling up and how you will address those issues. What specific issues would you identify? How do you propose addressing those issues? How will you evaluate progress and success in addressing those issues? How will you respond to identified areas of deficiency as the scale-up effort evolves?
