CENSEI Instructional Approach

Our philosophy

What do most people do with the science they learn in school? The answer is, from what research tells us: not much. We think this is bad. It's bad for people. It's bad for our communities. It's bad for our society. Life increasingly involves understanding science to make good decisions.

We believe that this means that science education has to meet two goals: 1) help people to learn core scientific explanations about how the world works; and 2) help people to understand how those explanations get made - how do we know what we know?

To be honest, the first goal isn't met very well, according to what we know about science achievement. It is actively addressed, at least, in science instruction. The second goal, on the other hand, is rarely even addressed. In the push to cover content to meet standards, it is easy to focus on the "what" of science concepts and bypass the "how" of scientific practice.

We believe, based on research in science learning across elementary and secondary school, that trying to meet both of these two goals together is the best bet for helping students learn science in a meaningful way, a way that they can use outside of school.

We organize our approach to developing instructional materials according the following principles. Science instruction should:

  1. Be organized around meaningful questions about the world.
  2. Engage students' prior knowledge and experience as the basis for scientific knowledge.
  3. Emphasize the interpretation and explanation of data.
  4. Promote students' monitoring of their own understanding.
  5. Relate students work in class to the practice of professional science.

Our Approach

CENSEI's instructional materials are developed with the following guidelines:

Easily integrated curricular modules. Our materials are designed as self-contained modules, intended to take about 3 weeks to complete. This makes it easier to fit them into your own teaching schedule. Also, each module points out opportunities where you can substitute or add your own lessons to our suggested lessons.

A focus on "big ideas." Each module focuses on one or two related "big ideas." This focus helps students to develop more coherent conceptual understanding. These ideas encompass a broad range of both California and National content standards, with the emphasis on understanding specific concepts to be able to explain things happening in the world.

Scaffolded scientific investigation. We follow an approach known as guided inquiry that has been shown to help students learn science better than typical instruction. This means providing students with opportunities to figure things out for themselves, with guidance provided by the sequence of lessons, scaffolds built into each lesson, and suggestions for how to promote student reflection.

Module Structure

Each module follows the same general structure:

The driving question. A module begins by posing a a driving question. A driving question is one that is interesting enough that people actually want to answer it, and "big" enough that the answer is not immediately apparent. Driving questions are big enough that they have to be broken down into smaller questions that are easier to answer. The decomposition of a big question into smaller questions, answering those questions, and then putting the smaller answers together to propose answers to the driving question organizes all of the learning activities in a module. Each module starts by guiding students to pose and buy into the driving question.

Knowledge-building activities. Once a driving question is posed, following activities help students to break that question up into smaller questions that can be answered through small-scale investigations such as modeling activities and labs. These activities are sequenced to help students develop the core knowledge they need to be able to pursue a more direct answer to the driving question.

Open-ended investigation. The initial knowledge-building activities are followed by students (usually collaborating in small groups) investigating online datasets to directly answer the driving question. These investigations help students to apply the concepts learned in knowledge-building activities, and to extend them as they construct explanations that use the data they explore to propose an answer to the driving question. These datasets come from sensor networks developed by UCLA's Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS).

Synthesis. Each module concludes with activities that help students to synthesize their activity into a coherent understanding. These activities include peer review of each other's explanations, self-reflection on their own understanding, and teacher-facilitated discussions of what has been learned, why we believe it, and what we still wonder about.