Look for: Cells damaged or missing

7.B Develop a model at a zoomed-in scale to describe what happens to the structure and function of skin cells at the time of injury.

The purpose of this assessment is formative in nature. Students have now figured out a lot about how the different parts of the body are made of cells and that all of these cells are unique to that part of the body. Now we need to begin to shift and make sense of what happens at the cell level for the body to heal from an injury. At this point in the unit, this assessment is formative in the sense that students should include cells in their models, specifically the type of cell that corresponds to the body part they chose to model in their notebook. They should also include how the injured part results in a change in the function of the foot. Students may represent the injured part at the cellular level in many different ways, such as:

Cells damaged or missing

Cells pushed apart but not broken

For students who are hesitant to brainstorm what this might look like at a cellular level, use probing questions such as the one below to help support them in incrementally developing this model:

What do you already know about how the (part of the body they chose to model) looks under the microscope?

When the weight fell on the student’s foot and injured it, what did the (part of the body they chose to model) look like in the images from the doctor?

Now imagine you could zoom in on (part of the body they chose to model) after the weight injured it. What do you think the cells would look like?