FOSS Middle School Update: Planetary Science

By Rebecca Deutscher, Ph.D., Research Associate Specialist, Lawrence Hall of Science

The first FOSS middle school course to be revised is nearing publication! Planetary Science, Second Edition, will be available in 2012. Revising a FOSS middle school course means working closely with teachers, examining current research in pedagogy, following news updates in the content area (since planetary science is a constantly-evolving field), and lots of field-testing.

We chose to revise the Planetary Science Course for two main reasons. It was the oldest course, first published in 2001, and it had the greatest need for content updates. For example, in 2001, one exoplanet (a planet orbiting a star other than our own) was known to exist. At the time of this newsletter printing, over 500 exoplanets have been confirmed and there is evidence for 1,235 other possibilities! In addition to content updates, we wanted to redesign the course to represent the most current research in the areas of formative assessment and student-centered notebooks. And overall, we wanted to make the course easier for teachers to teach and more beneficial to students’ learning.

The process begins with research. We communicated with teachers using the FOSS Planetary Science Course in the classroom to find out their concerns and needs, as well as getting input from former teachers who are now part of the FOSS staff. We looked at current planetary science news and research to find out what the big questions in the field are today, and we looked at state standards to find out what requirements teachers and districts need to meet.

We examined all these data and brainstormed about what to keep, what to add, and what to cut from the original course. The last question is always the hardest, but very important, since we know that teachers need to be able to get through the course in 9 to 10 weeks. We wanted to make sure we have depth of content to provide a rich learning experience for students, not just breadth of content to cover all the required standards.

Once we had a workable conceptual map for the course, we looked at new investigations that needed to be developed and worked with some local classrooms to test out the hands-on components. After lots of tweaking, we were finally ready to test the new course. Armed with an outline of what we hoped to accomplish, we worked with a local teacher to test the revised course. As those of us who work in classrooms know, the best-laid plans are put to the test when you’re actually facing a group of real students! So we collected data about what worked, questions the students still had, and areas requiring further development.

After looking at all the data, our middle school team got busy writing. Finally, we were ready with a draft of the revised Teacher Guide. We recruited a group of 10 teachers from across the country to travel to the Lawrence Hall of Science for training on the new course. Then, while they taught the course in their classrooms over the next few months, we made numerous site visits, collected quantitative and qualitative feedback from the teachers, and collected assessment data and other student work for analysis.

We compared pre- and posttest scores to measure whether the course addressed the content we intended. We analyzed notebook samples and teacher comments. We prepared statistical analyses of all the test items to check for validity. Using all the data we’d collected and their analyses, we made decisions about the changes we wanted to make, and then began the process of revising the Teacher Guide and student materials for our final published course.