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This talk is a discussion of a first-pass attempt at applying inquiry ideas in a tricky content area.
This talk is a discussion of a first-pass attempt at applying inquiry ideas in a
tricky content area.
Im not selling anything. Whereas the IFI folks have thought about inquiry for
years, I have tried this project once, with 3 students. So I have no grand
conclusions about How This Should Be Done or anything like that. But I
can highlight some important issues about the IFI inquiry design and how it
might need to be modified to suit ones needs.
If, after last Monday, youre thinking that inquiry is pretty neat but would be
really hard to do in your own field/teaching, Im here to say that you might
be right, and thats ok.
My talk can be seen as one kind of response to Alexs questions from last
Monday: how do you do this in something more theoretical? Not hands-
on? How does it look different? IFI = Institute for Inquiry; CfAO = Center for Adaptive Optics This is from the manual for the light & shadow inquiry that you went through
last Monday. Notice the bold claim that what you saw in that activity can be
applied to any topic. "Exploring Galaxies" was a project, as we term them, for the CfAOs cluster of
COSMOS. COSMOS is the California State Summer School for
Mathematics and Science (try to figure out how that acronym works), a 4-
week program for high school students in which they reside and learn on a
UC campus. COSMOS is divided into clusters of ~15 students apiece
students in a cluster take courses together. The CfAOs cluster is "Stars,
Sight, and Science" where we teach courses on astronomy, vision science,
and the science process, respectively. Inquiry methods had already been
applied (with great success) in the form of an optics inquiry that informs the
students about the workings of telescopes.
In the last ~2 weeks of our cluster the students divide into projects and spend
most of their time working on them. This is where the galaxies project
comes in.
I didnt particularly apply inquiry ideas to the first thread (taking our own data
and using it) so I wont discuss it. I started working on this in earnest at the May 2003 CfAO Maui Professional
Development Workshop, where we go through more IFI stuff similar to the
"3 kinds of hands-on learning" and "light & shadow inquiry" that youve
done. So this was the 2
nd
time Id done those activities as I was in Ed286 at
the time.
I led a design session where I laid out the kind of thing I wanted to do and
many people helped me hammer out some of the problems and issues.
During COSMOS itself, our cluster can have a nearly 1:1 responsible-adult-to-
student ratio at times, so I had plenty of support.
The images at the bottom were produced by the students. Each image is a
close-to-true-color composite made from B (blue), V (green), and R (red)
filter images. On the left is M101, a face-on spiral galaxy of Hubble type
Sc. In the center is M63, a not-quite-face-on spiral galaxy of Hubble type
Sb. On the right is M102, an edge-on lenticular galaxy of Hubble type S0. This is my interpretation of the IFI inquiry structure that you saw last Monday. It didnt take long designing the galaxies inquiry before I knew it couldnt
possibly look the same as the light & shadow inquiry. The content just
doesnt lend itself to long periods of self-driven messing around in an
attempt to figure galaxies out for oneself. HST=Hubble Space Telescope
This particular image is M31, our neighbor the Andromeda galaxy. It has two
satellite companions, the smaller one is M32 while the larger one is
NGC205.
Note the distinct gradient from yellow to blue as you go from the center to the
outskirts of M31.
I had students look at about a dozen images such as this one, and I had them
write down anything interested they noticed and/or wondered. I had thought
deeply about this activity. What to do if people asked the "wrong"
questions? But the more I thought about it: given any interesting
astronomical image, there are only a few sorts of questions you can ask:
Why is it bright here, dark there? Why is it this color here, that color there?
Why does/do the object(s) have this shape/arrangement? Because you only
have the image and not much else, the questions you can ask are somewhat
limited. So it is with "real" astronomers as well. So as it turns out it is pretty
difficult to ask a "wrong" question here. However that is not an invitation
for you to try youre clever and Im sure you could do it. These are more samples of the images I used, and samples of some questions
generated by the students. For the curious, thats M61 on the top and M51
("the Whirlpool") on the bottom. I find that adults are much more interested
in the names/designations of galaxies than students are. I think theres
something about that in The Little Prince, isnt there? An example of questions being generated at different levels, just
like in the light & shadow inquiry. Some students were asking
questions about the way the galaxies are, while others
immediately jumped to how they got to be that way. In fact,
simulations indicate that if a disk galaxy accretes a dwarf galaxy
along its rotation axis then a configuration such as this is a likely
outcome. So, a very insightful question.
Thats NGC6782. Instead of throwing the students into the investigation phase directly, I had
them go through a particular activity together so that I could assess their
level of thinking about galaxies. In the activity they are given ~30 postage-
stamp images of isolated galaxies and asked to classify/categorize them.
They choose the criteria and number of categories.
A representative sample is shown above. The students chose a one-
dimensional scheme that goes from yellow/round/smooth to
blueish/spiral/lumpy in six discrete steps, plus one junk category of blue
blobby galaxies. (In case you are wondering, this is pretty close to the
traditional Hubble sequence of galaxy classifcation, one sheme used by
astronomers.)
This activity was illuminating for me for instance, I saw that not all the
students understood how our particular viewing angle might affect the
apparent shape of a galaxy (astronomers would call this viewing angle
inclination). The meat of the investigation.
First I had the students remind themselves of some of the things theyd seen in
their previous COSMOS astronomy coursework: the basic components of a
galaxy, and so on.
Many of the questions were about the colors of galaxies. I showed a demo (the
red/blue box demo) that demonstrates that a bright light bulb is hotter and
bluer while a dim light bulb is cooler and redder. I explained that stars are
the same way. I carried them through a mini-lecture of how the hot blue
stars dont live all that long. Notice I did not explain why galaxy colors are
the way they are, but I gave them the crucial information (which they
couldnt possibly be expected to figure out for themselves) about stellar
evolution that should have allowed them to assemble a story about galaxy
colors. This is a recurring theme in this particular inquiry: rather than the
student figuring out how everything works, they instead figure out the
causal chain or the narrative links between component pieces that are taught
to them.
Also, there were a lot of great process skills being taught here. Example: how
do you find reliable information on the web?
Note that in this inquiry there was much more 2nd-hand investigation (texts,
the web, etc) rather than 1st-hand like in the light & shadow inquiry. This is
related to Hoyts comment at the Exploratorium last week, about how at first
he wondered: surely someone knows about this, why not just read
something?
As I felt that the students could give me pretty good explanations about
solitary, passively evolving galaxies, I pushed their questions to interactions
between galaxies (thered been some examples in the original images Id
shown them during the question phase).
Here finally is a part of the inquiry where the students can actually "mess
around" with galaxies, just like in an IFI inquiry! Obviously the light & shadow inquiry is hands-on while many science topics
are not. Even in the high-school chemistry lab in some sense the epitome
of hands-on science no one is actually playing around with valence
electrons the way we played around with light bulbs at the Exploratorium.
But connections can be made between the 1st-hand experience (the fluid in
this beaker changed color or whatever) and the 2nd-hand description
(bonds).
Light & shadow is a physics topic. But many sciences work differently from
physics.