Welcome
Welcome to Project-Based Inquiry Science (PBIS):
A Middle-School Science Curriculum!
This year, your students will be learning the way scientists learn, exploring interesting
questions and challenges, reading about what other scientists have discovered, investigating,
experimenting, gathering evidence, and forming explanations. They will learn to collaborate with
others to find answers and to share their learning in a variety of ways. In the process, they
will come to see science in a whole new, exciting way that will motivate them throughout their
educational experiences and beyond.
What is PBIS?
In Project-Based Inquiry Science learning, students investigate scientific content and learn science practices in the context of attempting to address challenges in or answer questions about the world around them. Early activities introducing students to a challenge help them to generate issues that need to be investigated, making inquiry a student-driven endeavor. Students investigate as scientists would—through observations, designing and running experiments, designing, building, and running models, reading written material, and so on, as appropriate. Throughout each project, students might make use of technology and computer tools that support their efforts in observation, experimentation, modeling, analysis, and reflection. Teachers support and guide the student inquiries by framing the guiding challenge or question, presenting crucial lessons, managing the sequencing of activities, and eliciting and steering discussion and collaboration among the students. At the completion of a project, students publicly exhibit what they have learned, along with their solutions to the specific challenge. Personal reflections to help students learn from the experience is embedded in student activities, as are opportunities for assessment.
The curriculum will provide three years of piloted project-based inquiry materials for middle-school science.
Individual curriculum Units have been defined that cover the scope of the national content
and process standards for the middle-school grades. Each Unit focuses on helping students acquire
qualitative understanding of targeted science principles and move toward quantitative understanding,
is infused with technology, and provides a foundation in reasoning skills, science content, and science
process that will ready them for more advanced science. The curriculum as a whole introduces students
to a wide range of investigative approaches in science (for example, experimentation and modeling) and is designed to
help them develop scientific reasoning skills that span those investigative approaches.
Technology can be used in project-based inquiry to make available to students some of the same kinds of tools and aids used by scientists in the field. These range from pencil-and-paper tools for organized data recording, collection, and management to software tools for analysis, simulation, modeling, and other tasks. Such infusion provides a platform for providing prompts, hints, examples, and other kinds of aids to students as they are engaging in scientific reasoning. The learning technologies and tools that are integrated into the curriculum offer essential scaffolding to students as they are developing their scientific reasoning skills and are seamlessly infused into the overall completion of project activities and investigations.