Laura

I will create a 4 point BAME rubric - beginning, approaching, meeting, exceeding -- that focuses on the research question, hypothesis, investigation procedure, and presentation of results. It's important for me to take into account the English language levels of my students, and for these reason I think most of the focus on language will go into the inquiry question, hypothesis, and brief analysis of results. My students are also new to graphing and data presentation, and since this is such an important skills I also want to focus on this in the rubric. For these reasons, I found the assessment rubric for 4th grade reports to be the most helpful.

I research Project Feederwatch. It is a Citizen Scientist project where people count birds in their backyard over the winter, from November - April. Participants are sent a research kit that includes a bird id calendar, but they have to supply the feeder and birdseed. It's used, as the video noted, to study winter bird abundance, and provides "information about bird population biology that cannot be detected by any other available method." Participants can see information such as historic maps, the top birds in their region, bird summaries, and trend graphs. I think this would be a fun winter project to practice bird identification and speculate about what might be causing changes in bird population over time, as well as away to explore the interconnectedness of life.

I am a contributor to eBird. One challenge I face is identifying birds accurately, especially when it is a bird I can only see briefly or from a distance, or one I've never seen before. Since I'm new to birding, another challenge is contributing more "rare" birds and being fully certain when you've identified a bird -- for example, we were pretty sure we saw a black-chinned hummingbird in a tree, but didn't feel completely positive about it. I expect that students who participate in this project would strengthen their observational skills.

II live in a pretty urban area, and the majority of the sounds I heard were man-made -- a lot of cars, people talking, the sound of wind chimes. It'd be interesting to do this activity with students in a variety of places. I also really like the way this sound map activity was organized --rather than just making a list of things you hear, you are mapping sounds and putting yourself in the center. I also like that you can use symbols and images, for students who may be new to reading and writing. I really liked the lemon lesson too -- I think adding a competitive edge and real reason behind making the observations makes the importance of both strong observations and strong evidence really clear to students.

I wish to model all of these practices in my teaching, but I especially want to focus on positioning youth as people who do science. I work with newcomer students who have little to no previous formal education, and my colleagues and I have found that developing a "growth mindset" around school-related work can be especially challenging for these students. By positioning my students as people who do science, and helping them become experts and active participants in citizen science, I hope to make my students feel proud, confident, and empowered. I think it's also important to make their science learning more authentic. I hope to model this in my teaching by finding real citizen science projects for my students to participate in, helping them see their roles as important and real, and supporting them by giving them the skills to become experts.

We do a seed growing activity -- students place seeds in cotton, add water, and put seeds in sunlight and in a dark closet to see if the seeds grow. I think this is confirmation inquiry, because students are provided with the question and the procedure. Through this activity, students develop experience in conducting investigations and collecting and organizing data. To modify this lesson to make it guided inquiry, I would make the question more open ended -- what are the best conditions under which plants can grow? This would support students in designing their own procedures to test their theories.