The Goals of Elementary School Level Science Projects
Understand the Goals of Elementary School Level Science Projects
and You Can Be a Better Home Support System
Science teachers have different goals for science fairs, and how they organize it should reflect what they are trying to get across. Elementary teachers are preparing their students for middle school where things start getting more independent so by 5th grade the students should have had several different experiences with school level science projects and how they work.
Here are some different examples of what elementary science teachers real goals might be, and what you can expect to see.
- The goal might be simply how to meet deadlines, so a project could be separated into several steps with clear due dates. For this assignment, the project itself is less important than the process you go through to do it. The bonus will be learning something interesting about science and hopefully having some fun!
- The goal might be a specific science concept the teacher is trying to get across, so there will be a list of specific projects to choose from. These are projects that the teacher knows will demonstrate the idea they want them to experience and learn from. This is not the time to be creative, just do the project as it was assigned.
- The goal might be learn how to develop and write hypotheses as part of the scientific method, so the assignment will be more open ended and based on creating questions and making predictions about what the students see around you. This is an important skill to be developed for middle and high school in order for these school level science projects to end up with valid results. The hypothesis needs to be targeted to one variable, which is not as easy to do as it sounds.
- The goal might be to teach the proper way to display your results, so organizing a display board, setting up graphs, and writing a report summary will be emphasized. Again the science learned along the way will be great, but extra attention will need to be paid to the results end of things.
Is there any way to tell what the teacher’s goal is?
Sometimes the teacher comes right out and states in the assignment which of these things they are targeting. Other times you can tell by the grading chart and where you see the highest % to the final grade. When the assignment is open ended, you can figure the process is a priority, when specific experiments are assigned, you can figure the science is the priority.
Most of the time it is a two-fer. The benefits of science fair projects are great, so you use the key science concepts they want the kids to discover and teaching how to organize their projects and the standard scientific steps to doing a project, that will involve the using scientific method.
Often mini-classroom science fairs or really demonstrations will be used throughout the year to teach the different parts and then it will end the year with a full fledged science fair where the students do an independent project.
Follow this link for some great elementary school level science projects that not only are set up to follow the standard scientific procedures that all science teacher’s use, but can also be done quickly, easily and most importantly independently.
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