News . Best Practices Making progress towards using evidence from a range of sources when making claims (Best Practice – UK)
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This best practice reports an open schooling initiative about Rewilding UK! It was developed by Town Close School. The activities were developed with a researcher in Science and the Biology teacher. It was supported by the Mastery Science UK. This practice was presented at the UK CONNECT festival: https://youtu.be/NYUqlUSAegE
Care: Students were engaged in discussing how to protect the environment by bringing back extinct UK wild animals such as wolves and bears to their natural habitat. Participants were 30 students who contributed to discussions about which animal to rewild and prepared a campaign to persuade the public of the benefits of rewilding.
Know: They used knowledge about interdependence and ecosystems. They also used geographic knowledge information about natural habitats for these animals. The skills that students practiced were devising questions, visual communication, data analysis and the enquiry skill of weighing up evidence to support a claim. They also used maths skills to prepare graphs and geographic information about habitat.
Do: Students shared questions, created persuasive posters and practiced argumentation using data and facts. They were all engaged with the activities, and they enjoyed researching information and making decisions. They were keen to discuss the evidence for their chosen animal during the campaign. Students were interested in and confident in using science knowledge.
Findings:
Students were keen to discuss the evidence to support claims for their chosen animal during the campaign. It fitted the curriculum well and the video clips were very good. The children enjoyed it and actually wanted to know if it ‘was real’. Teacher said “ I think some thought that their votes would genuinely count towards initiated a rewilding of their animal. Having a scientist Zooming in gave the project some credibility and they were engaged by this.”
Outcomes: The teachers reported that students were keen to discuss the evidence for their chosen animal during the campaign. All were engaged with the activities, and they enjoyed learning science.
Ten students, between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, contributed to this open schooling research questionnair. Most students said that learning science will be useful in their daily lives, as well as that they feel confident using science to come up with questions and ideas, in addition, all of them said that they think learning science is fun. The data collected also shows that almost half of the students don’t feel confident with their knowledge in science.
More details of our report: on this link.