K-3+Focus+Strategies

Staged Scenarios Staged scenarios are an effective way to generate student questions on a topic that would not occur naturally. Consider the principal who shares his/her worry that the school grounds are unattractive with teachers and students at each grade level on the first day of school. The principal's concern that he/she will have an important government official, celebrity, or star athlete visit the school campus serves as a school-wide impetus to start grade level landscaping projects that incorporate important science (e.g., percolation and compaction, plant growth, soil composition, scientific method) and math concepts (e.g., number sense, geometry, estimation).

Reflective Discovery Reflective discovery allows students to interact with a tool or manipulative and then brainstorm their own questions, generate possible hypotheses and draw conclusions based on their interaction.

Discrepant Events A discrepant event is defined by the Institute for Connecting Science Research to the Classroom at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University as "an event that surprises, startles, puzzles, or astonishes the observer." Discrepant events are designed to trigger a sense of curiosity about the critical concepts and processes behind the event. The questioning and wonder lead students to ask better questions and to make connections between the event and the content under investigation.

Surveys/Questionnaires Depending on the types of questions/statements generated, surveys and questionnaires can elicit powerful and targeted emotional responses from students. There are two basic types of surveys or questionnaires: one designed to elicit information from the participant (e.g., interest inventory, consumer survey); the other designed to give feedback/results to the participant (e.g., IQ test, personal learning style). Both can help students make connections between themselves and the content and generate provocative questions.

Current Events Current events impact the classroom immediately and often quite powerfully. Current events such as presidential elections, the Olympics, and recent tragedies are of great interest and concern to students. Giving students an opportunity to process the information surrounding an event and to make connections between that event and what they are learning helps students structure their learning beyond summarizing and replaying the information back to the teacher; it fosters purposeful inquiry such as problem-solving, decision-making, experimentation, and inductive/deductive thinking.