April 13

Cat’s Meow & Operational Questions: Have students try the demo/activity. … Ask students about things they could change in their experiments … List … (way to get students thinking about the properties of the materials involved) … write operational question for each of the following categories: substitution, increasing/decreasing, elimination … pick question you like best, id all variables that must be held constant … carry out experiments … Be sure to define operational questions: questions that can be answered directly by investigation (refer students to coursepack readings)
Have students try various experiments of their own to better understand the behavior they observed. Ultimately, lesson should contrast operational questions from those that are not directly investigable. Direct students to Shiland article in course pack.
Stress also how continued curiosity leads from one question to another, generally basing the new question on the results of the first investigation.

Discuss LTRP & Generate Questions: Assignment is due three weeks from today, so if you haven’t started already then you are limited to projects that can be completed in three weeks. This is fine, in most cases. It is time, though, to start thinking seriously about the assignment; it counts for 25% of the course’s grade. … On Wed. or next Monday we can talk about using online databases as an alternative way of doing the project. … Help students to understand that good Q’s usually involve investigating potential relationships between variables, testing predictions from explanations. A simple preference survey doesn’t fit well. Examples from the past (posted on the web):
• How much aspartame does it take before people can distinguish ‘regular’ from diet sodas?
• How does lack of sleep affect your ability to work math problems?
• Does quantity of alcohol served affect the size of my tip?
• Do expensive clothes stores carry a different range of sizes than discount stores? [not as good: What range of sizes do clothing stores carry?]
• How does location affect prices at nail shops?
• How do bird feeder locations affect food consumption?
• Does frequency of hand-washing decrease # of colds in an elementary classroom?
• Does having a snack help children perform better on math quizzes?
If time permits, students can discuss Q’s they’ve already thought of, or brainstorm other Q’s that could be investigated.

FOR NEXT TIME: Finish Swanson chapter, and have thought of at least one question that could be investigated for LTRP.