Astrobiology

Astrobiology was designed to seamlessly weave Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Earth and Space Science throughout the entire curriculum.

Course Structure:

Setting the Stage
This feature offers an engaging chapter introduction that piques students’ curiosity. It also outlines the chapter’s key questions, themes, and sequence of ideas as well as briefly describes the activities. By outlining the big picture, this section literally “sets the stage” for the Chapter Challenge, which immediately follows.

Preparing for the Challenge
Each chapter opens with one or two open-ended questions that give students the opportunity to express their ideas about topics covered in that chapter. These questions enable teachers to gauge the class’s preconceptions and initial levels of understanding about the central concepts in a chapter. Uncovering preconceptions and exposing the diversity of ideas in the classroom are the first steps in the learning cycle.

Challenge
The Challenge is the core of the Astrobiology curriculum and provides the context for all the activities within a chapter. Every activity in a chapter contributes to solving the central problem set forth in the Challenge. The Challenge provides a ready answer to the question asked all too often by students, “Why am I doing this?”
An important element of the Challenge is that it gives opportunities for students with diverse interests and abilities to express their understanding in different ways. All Challenges involve writing to one extent or another, but some feature oral presentations, teaching, designing brochures, constructing models, or preparing formal presentations. Students who express themselves artistically will shine in some Challenges, while those who enjoy designing and constructing will take a leading role in others.
Challenges are flexible enough to engage students at all levels. Each Challenge has a detailed set of criteria, so at the outset students not only understand what they are expected to do, but they also recognize the criteria for success.

Assessment Criteria
The completion of a Challenge serves as the primary source of summative assessment information. Traditional assessment strategies often give too much attention to the memorization of terms or the recall of information. As a result, they often fall short of providing information about students’ ability to think and reason critically and apply information they have learned. In Astrobiology: An Integrated Science Approach, student-generated solutions to the Challenges render information teachers use to assess thinking, reasoning, and problem-solving skills that are essential to lifelong learning.
In any effective curriculum model, the mode of instruction and the mode of assessment are connected. Astrobiology: An Integrated Science Approach uses multiple assessment formats. Some are non-traditional and are consistent with reform movements in science education that the curriculum is designed to promote. Project-based assessment, for example, is built into every Challenge. At the same time, the developers acknowledge the need to support teachers whose classroom context does not allow them to depart completely from traditional assessment formats, such as paper and pencil tests.
All expectations are clearly communicated to students and related to how students will exhibit, in their final assessment, their understanding of key concepts.

Activity Introduction
These brief, engaging paragraphs introduce each activity and emphasize the connections between the activity topic and the field of astrobiology. They highlight interesting but sometimes less-than-obvious aspects of a topic and provide a rich context for an activity.

What You Need to Do
The What You Need to Do section has step-by-step instructions that guide students through each part of an activity. The investigations are the opportunity for students to garner the knowledge that they will need to complete the Challenge. Astrobiology: An Integrated Science Approach is a hands-on, minds-on curriculum, where doing science is essential to learning science. Students do hands-on experiments, carry out fieldwork, conduct long-term research projects, and search for information using the Internet and reference materials. A complete Teacher Guide has blackline masters and transparencies for maps, illustrations, and sheets necessary for students to complete the activities.
Each activity is based on a 5-E learning cycle and moves from concrete to abstract. Hands-on activities provide the basis for exploring student beliefs about how the world works and for manipulating variables that affect the outcomes of experiments, models, or simulations. Later in each activity, terminology is introduced through readings used to describe the processes that students have explored through hands-on activity. This flow from concrete (hands-on) to abstract (formal explanations) is progressive—students begin to develop their own responses to questions raised within the What Do You Think, Challenge, and What You Need to Do sections.
Most activities require one to two class periods. In addition, they were designed to use low-cost, readily available equipment. The Planning and Pacing Guide shows the time and materials required by each activity.
Many teachers not accustomed to using the learning cycle to develop student understanding believe students need to have background knowledge before doing an activity. Thus, they want to deliver a lecture about the phenomena before allowing students to do the investigation. Such an approach is common to many traditional programs and is inconsistent with the pedagogical theory behind the design of the Astrobiology curriculum. The appropriate place for delivering a lecture or reading about a topic is following the investigation, not preceding it. For example, suppose a group of students has been asked to interpret images to determine whether there is any evidence for water on Mars. The traditional approach to science education will have the teacher:
1 Give a lecture or assign a reading, such as “Surface Features that Indicate Water,”
2 Give students practice by looking at examples of water-related surface features, and then
3 Let students interpret images of the surface of Mars.
Astrobiology teachers recognize that, within a group of students, it is not uncommon for at least one of the students to have a vital skill or piece of knowledge required to solve a problem. The one or two students who have been exposed to (or better yet, understand) scale, for example, have the opportunity to shine within the group by contributing that vital piece of information or demonstrating a skill. That’s how scientific research teams work—specialists bring expertise to the group, and by working together, the group achieves something that no one could have achieved working alone. The What You Need to Do section is modeled in the spirit of the scientific research team.

Skill Boxes
A skill box summarizes a science process skill that is central to the activity in which it appears. Each skill box describes a skill, such as drawing graphs, making estimates, using ratios, writing scientific notation, and taking a sample, and provides examples showing how to apply the skill. The table of contents lists the skill boxes so students can refer to them whenever necessary.

What You Need to Know
Each activity has a What You Need to Know reading that introduces and develops the science concepts explored in the activity. The one- to two-page readings are written at the ninth-grade level and place the activity in its scientific context, relate it to the field of astrobiology, and tie together concepts within the activity or a set of activities. In addition to text, there are illustrations, data tables, and photographs. To help students extract the information in this section, important terms are boldfaced and defined, captions summarize key points, and subtitles highlight important themes within a reading.

Checking In Questions
Checking In questions probe student understanding of the central ideas discussed in a What You Need to Know reading. They make excellent discussion questions for groups or the whole class. Teachers can assign Checking In questions as homework to guide students to think about the major ideas in a reading. Teachers can also use Checking In questions as quizzes, rephrasing the questions into multiple choice or “true-false” formats. This provides assessment information about student understanding and serves as a “motivational” tool to ensure that students complete the reading assignment and comprehend the main ideas.

Think About It Questions
Unlike the fact-based Checking In questions, Think About It questions are high-level thinking and analysis questions that probe students’ understanding of the activity’s key points. These questions follow completion of an investigation—they ask students to synthesize the ideas introduced in an activity and apply concepts to new situations. They can be assigned as homework, or they can be used as the basis of group work, group discussion, or class discussion.

Reflecting on the Activity and the Challenge
Each activity in a chapter contributes to the solution of the Challenge. Reflecting on the Activity and the Challenge gives students a brief summary of the activity and poses several questions that help students relate the activity they just completed to the “big picture.” Students place the new insights and information into the context of the chapter and the Challenge. If the Challenge is considered the completed puzzle picture, each activity is a jigsaw piece. The Reflecting on the Activity and the Challenge section ensures that students remember the larger context and continue their personal momentum toward completion of the Challenge.
This feature is an important metacognitive tool that encourages students to examine what they have learned in chapter and then think critically about the usefulness of the results of their work. The process of synthesizing what they have learned in order to solve the Challenge forces students to take stock of their learning and evaluate whether they really understand it. It is important for teachers to guide students through this process with questions such as:
• What part of your work best helps you solve the Challenge?
• How does what you learned help you solve the Challenge?
• How does this assignment relate to the criteria that we established for your chapter report?
• Are you making the best possible use of the evidence you have gathered?
Teachers also find this section useful for students who were absent for an investigation. In situations where students cannot make up the investigation, teachers can use this section to provide an overview of what was missed. Although reading about the main point of an activity is a poor substitute for actually doing it, teachers find that the overview helps them deal with the reality of student absences and the hectic pace of school schedules.

End-of-Chapter Pages
To give students a sense of accomplishment and serve as a quick review of all that was learned in a chapter, this section at the end of each chapter provides:
• Building Math Skills
• Building Science Inquiry Skills
• Learning Goals (keyed by page for student review)
• Review What You Have Learned (multiple choice questions)
• What’s the Big Idea? (major concept questions)
• Making Connections (questions relating chapter concepts with those in other chapters)
• Science on the Internet (projects linked to the Astrobiology Curriculum Web site and the Internet)
• Exploring Further (non-Internet projects for further inquiry)