The Kentucky Team Presents a Vignette From One of Its Classrooms: Integrating Classroom Learning, Outdoor Investigations, and Assessment
In Kentucky, Sharon’s fourth graders choose to be in one of three working groups and develop their expertise in a specific area. This story describes the work of one group as it explores worms and their schoolyard habitats. Sharon’s teaching strategies include using the KWL (Know, Want to know, Learn) sequence, having students develop and find answers to their own questions, design their own experiments, collect and analyze data, and facilitate the learning of other students. This vignette describes how she assessed and promoted her students’ growth, first as learners and then as facilitators of other students’ learning.
After teaching primary grades for twenty-seven years, Sharon was assigned a
fourth-grade class for the first time – and she had been assigned as the team science
teacher. Her lack of self-confidence in science was only intensified by pressures from the
building and district level to increase science scores on Kentucky’s performance
assessments. Therefore, she eagerly volunteered to participate in the VINE Follow-Through
Project. The project would incorporate welcomed assistance from parents and other
volunteers, and she would learn more about environmental science in an outdoor setting. It
would also provide her with support from other educators throughout the year: two teachers
at her own school, another teaching team from a school across town, the district science
specialist, the district environmental education specialist, and a university professor.
And to top it all off, she would use the outdoors as her classroom – a personal
favorite.
After several meetings during the late summer and early part of the school year, the Follow-Through team had decided to use three outdoor investigation activities in the spring to facilitate students’ understanding of the environmental factors that influence plants and animals: Worm Worlds (Berkowitz and Bohlen, 1996), Animal Diversity (OBIS, 1982), and Terrestrial Hi-Lo Hunt (OBIS, 1979). The resulting unit would culminate with a performance event and assessment. The children would choose to work in one of three groups: worms, animal diversity, or hunting for Hi’s and Lo’s. Each group would develop expertise in one of the investigations and share its expertise with other students when the schools visited one another’s sites in May. Parents and high school students would assist teachers during the initial learning experiences and during the site visits. The children would ultimately work together to collect data on animals, habitats, and environmental factors (such as moisture, temperature and light) at each school. As an assessment of their learning, they would draw conclusions about ecological relationships when responding to a writing prompt.
Launching the Project
Sharon first contacted parents who would facilitate the investigations with the student groups and gathered other resources for the groups to use. A fellow team member provided a collection of earthworm activities, and the environmental education coordinator trained the parent and high school volunteers in Worm Worlds, Animal Diversity, and Terrestrial Hi-Lo Hunt. It was now time to introduce the children to the project.
Sharon began by explaining to the children that they would choose an area in which they would develop expertise, work on learning as much as they could about their area, and then become the teachers when the other school visited them. The children were excited about becoming "experts" and teachers, and eagerly selected an area of focus. At this point, Sharon worked separately with each of the three groups on the first two parts of the KWL strategy: to find out what the children already KNOW and what they WANT to know. She would assess what the children had LEARNED later on.
The eight children who had chosen to become worm experts had some interesting comments regarding what they "knew":
A worm’s tail grows back if you cut it off.
They live underground.
They are easy to catch because they’re slow.
There are many kinds of worms.
They don’t have a mouth or eyes.
They have many hearts.
They live under rocks.
They wiggle when they move—not in a straight line.
Once Sharon had determined what they already knew — or thought they knew — it was time to find out what the students wanted to know about worms. The discussion about what was "known" had prompted some disagreement, and children now wanted to find out what was or was not true about worms:
How do they eat if they don’t have a mouth?
What do they eat?
Why do they come out after it rains?
Do they live in all states, or just in Kentucky?
How do they reproduce?
Can they sense danger? (The children had just studied camouflage.)
How do they protect themselves?
Can they see?
How long do they live?
How do they know where they’re going in the dark underground?
Seeking Answers
Sharon told the children that they must find answers to these questions and many more because the other students would expect the experts to know the answers. She asked the students how they could find their answers. Children suggested using the library and encyclopedias, doing experiments, and observing worms.
Sharon asked the students to select the question that most interested them and then work in small groups to find answers. One group chose to observe a worm to find out whether or not it had a mouth. With a hand lens, they could see a mouth, but there was no evidence of an eye. Another group that had chosen to go to the library to do research on worms came back and shared their finding that worms did not have eyes but could detect light.
While
looking through some of Sharon’s materials, one group found an experiment about
whether worms prefer moist or dry places. The children decided to try this experiment
because it might explain why earthworms come up after a rain. Sharon first encouraged them
to talk about how they would go about doing the experiment. After they had brainstormed
and come up with a procedure closely resembling the actual experiment, Sharon let them use
the handout and the children followed the directions for the experiment. They charted the
results. It appeared that the worms preferred moister places...but why? Once again, a
library research group assisted their understanding.
Sharing Findings and Investigating Outdoors
After each group had come to some conclusions, they
shared their findings. Now Sharon felt the children were ready to go outdoors for the Worm
Worlds investigation. Their goal was to find out where the most worms lived in the
schoolyard and which environmental factors seemed to affect where the worms lived. Sharon
called the parent volunteers to come in and explain the investigation to groups from her
class and her Follow-Through team teacher’s class. The next day, the volunteers 
returned to do Worm Worlds with the students. Students recorded data about
the location and environmental factors at sites in the woods and on the grassy playing
field. They marked off quadrats in wooded and grassy sites around the schoolyard, poured a
solution made with dry mustard over the quadrants, and waited for the worms to appear.
They recorded how many juvenile and adult worms they found at each site and discovered
that the woods had the most worms.
The Worm Worlds data sheet indicated that a "clitellum" differentiated adult worms from juveniles. The students wondered what a clitellum was, and Sharon encouraged them to research the answer. They found out that it was related to reproduction and, much to their surprise, that worms were both male and female all at once! They also wondered why they had found so many more juvenile than adult worms. Finally, they wondered why the mustard solution used in Worm Worlds made the worms come to the surface.* They would find this out sometime, but for now it was time to focus on what they knew about worms and why worms live where they do.
* Worm scientists developed the technique described in Worm Worlds to extract worms from the ground without harming the worms or destroying their habitat. The mustard and water mixture recommended is a very mild irritant that oxidizes rapidly. Rinsing collected worms in fresh water ends the reaction.
Sharon decided that the children had the knowledge and experience to practice being teachers. With the help of parent volunteers, they taught a third-grade class about worms. When they were done, Sharon asked her students to reflect upon the experience in their science journals: what went well, what didn’t go well, and what they needed to improve. Their reflections indicated that the experiment went quite well, but they had concerns about the behavior of their "students." Some hadn’t been paying attention. Sharon asked her students what they should do differently. The children decided that part of the problem was that they, as teachers, hadn’t been cooperative in sharing the teaching role. They wanted to think about how they could take turns being the teacher.
Assessing the Learning
Sharon assessed what the children had learned by use of a writing prompt asking what they had learned and experienced in the Worm Worlds activity. She was pleased with the responses, believing that the children had learned a great deal about worms and about the importance of using scientific procedures. Students wrote very specific experimental procedure descriptions as well as their conclusions about why worms live where they do:
More worms live in the woods because the soil is looser and easier to burrow through.
More worms live in the woods because there is more decaying matter and leaves. It is easier to find something to eat.
The leaves in the woods hold the moisture in the ground. The worms like the moisture.
The worms like the woods better because there is more camouflage there. It is harder for birds to find them.
Worms don’t like the grass because it is too sunny and they would dry out.
The grassy ground is too hard for the worms to build their homes in.
The children had learned much through Sharon’s facilitation of their conceptual development. She had started with what they knew (or thought they knew), encouraged inquiry by finding out what they wondered about, and provided a learning environment that supported their investigations. The worm experts were now ready to be teachers when the students from the other school came to visit. In return, they would learn about animal diversity or environmental conditions from their peers at this other school. Ultimately, they would interact with other "experts" in their class in order to learn about the discoveries made by all of the groups and further develop their concepts about how environmental factors influence living things.
From Changing What We Do by Karen Hollweg and Carole Kubota with Phyllis Ferrell, copyright 1998 by NAAEE