With students returning to the classroom and laboratory post-pandemic it has become obvious that one of the biggest areas where learning gaps have occurred is in the building of the core practical skills. Certainly students seem to me to be lagging about two years behind from what I usually expect in skills such as making measurements or mass or temperature, recognising and using common lab apparatus safely and appropriately.
It seems like a good time to reflect on the way I teach practical science and to factor into recovery plans some strategies to boost these core skills. I reflected on my past experience and revisted the Good Practical Science Report from 2017 as a starting point for me to consider what the aims of practical science are and the benchmarks of well implemented practical science.
It stood out to me that I could try to provide more “frequent and varied” opportunities for students than I had in the past. So when planning I should be aiming for some “practical activity in at least half of their science lessons” .
Time is short though, I know in my own planning that practical work is often the victim of the rush to ensure delivery of the full syllabus. Add to this a complex timetable with rooming requirements meaning most of my Year 9 Biology is in a classroom, it is tough!
I resolved to try and create a series simple “skills” practicals that are not explicitly linked to syllabus content. This has the benefit of allowing them to fit in as and when the opportunity arises in the early lessons. I also hope this might result in gained time later in the year when we start completing investigations like osmosis potato chips or food tests.
I started with a very basic task: record the temperature of hot water over 5 minutes. A simple task that only took 10 minutes of the lesson but was deceptively tricky; some students had thermometers the wrong way around to begin with, many forgot to start the timer and majority didn’t produce a table of results without prompting.
For this activity I produced a very basic slides presentation for the task (HERE). I didn’t use the whole thing in five minutes but this was shared with students as an attachment to the Google Classroom assignment. They submitted their final recorded results which were easy to assess with a rubric (HERE) and the Mote voice notes and feedback extension. This is a fantastic tool that allows for super quick and easy individual feedback.
Next task we’re going to try is to measure and record pH using UI (HERE). The slant being towards accurately recording qualitative judgements.
As the year progresses I’ll be adding all the slides for these activities to a folder (HERE) and would welcome feedback or ideas for simple skills that I could add to this.
msdsscience 