Modeling and Model Eliciting Activies

1. Modeling and Model Eliciting Activies Day 4: Elementary STEM MSTA Region 11 Teacher Center

2. Problem Solving & Modeling Goals Teachers helping students develop connections among STEM disciplines through representation and translation. Teachers helping students elicit their mathematical, scientific and engineering thinking through modeling.

3. Sequence of Activities • Modeling Activity: Chicks and Penguins • Model Eliciting Activity: Water • Model Eliciting Activity: Bigfoot

4. PLC Reflection • Sit with others who are not from your school. • Share lessons and student work. • Write down three good ideas and the person’s name who you learned the idea from.

5. Lesh Translation Model Lesh & Doerr (2003)

6. Chicks and Penguins Your role: teacher and student Investigate the strategies that animals have to survive in difficult conditions. Create an activity that could be used with kindergarten and/or 1st grade students.

7. Chicks and Penguins • Write a conclusion for the story. • How can you use the materials in your bin to design an experiment that will demonstrate the scientific principle illustrated in the story? Use the activity sheet to guide your progress. • Each group member should complete the worksheet.

8. Chicks and Penguins

9. Filtering Water for Salia’s Kachua Please write a letter to me that tells me: • How to rank all of my filter designs. • Show me the work which explains how your team ranked the filter designs. • Why you think your way ranking water filter designs will help me pick the best design.

10. Representations in the Filter Problem • What representations were elicited in this problem? • How can you as a teacher foster multiple representations on this problem? Translations between representations? • What are the “big” conceptual ideas that are elicited in this problem?

11. Task 2 • How does Task 2 extend the translations?

12. Model Construction Principle • What knowledge do students bring to this problem?

13. Reality Principle • What is provided in this MEA that students can use to test their ways of thinking?

14. Self-Assessment Principle • What documentation are the students being asked to produce in this MEA?

15. Model Documentation Principle • What documentation are the students being asked to produce in this MEA?

16. Model Share Ability & Reusability Principle • What element will ensure that the model will be understandable by others and will be able to be applied to other data?

17. Effective Prototype Principle • What are the “big” conceptual ideas?

18. Complex Modeling Activities • We are going to participate in a modeling activity called “Bigfoot” • There are multiple solution paths to this problem, and the answer will not be easily apparent at first. You’ll have to work at it. • Teachers: Solve this problem as if you have the mathematical background of 3rd grade students.

19. Bigfoot Individually: • Read the newspaper article “Expert Tracker Shares His Experiences” and answer the readiness questions.

20. Bigfoot In your teams: • Read the problem statement and answer the team questions together. • Create a procedure for the mayor • Be prepared to share your solutions in a 2 minute presentation.

21. Connecting MEAs to the Standards • To which standards does this MEA connect? • Consider math, science, and engineering • Are there standards to which all MEAs connect? Which ones?

22. Summary and Closure PLCs -Plan an MEA to implement -Implement the MEA -Share student products