OpenSciEd Unit 7.4 · Lesson 06 · 6.B
Look for: Carbon dioxide, water, and light interact to…
From Teacher Edition
Facilitation guidance from the lesson plan — what to notice in student thinking and how to respond while teaching.
Building towards
6.B Engage in argument from evidence about what plants need to make food molecules using evidence from the computer simulation and scientific reasoning to support an explanation for why decreasing the amount of water, carbon dioxide, light, or chloroplasts (cause) in a plant cell decreases the amount of sugar and oxygen it produces (effect).
What to look / listen for
Students claims include one or more of the following:
Carbon dioxide, water, and light interact to make food in a plant.
The more carbon dioxide, water, and light a plant gets, the more food it can make
- Students can agree or disagree with another student’s claim using evidence from their investigation.
- Students can build off each other’s ideas to articulate how the results from their investigations relate.
What to do
If students struggle with making a claim based on their evidence from the simulation, encourage them to summarize the data in a statement initially. Then ask students to use this summary to generalize this relationship. One example might be:
Student sample summary
When I increased the amount of carbon dioxide from 100 to 150, the amount of sugar that was made in the plant increased from 8 to 9.
Student sample generalization
If a plant gets more carbon dioxide, it will make more sugar.
When students are sharing their claims in their small group, if they are struggling with the relationship of how increasing or decreasing the inputs into the plant system affects the outputs, ask them to explain in their own words what they saw happen in the simulation when they changed variables. Once they do this, encourage them to explain the relationship using words such as, “When ___________ increased/decreased, ___________ increased/decreased,” or “If there was more ___________, then the plant made more _________.”
The talking stick protocol is used to ensure equitable floor time for all students in the discussion in the first couple of rounds. No one should interrupt, not even ask questions for the first round. This gives students an opportunity to practice articulating their claims in front of a smaller audience before going public in front of the whole class. The second round of discussion encourages students to build off each other’s ideas, which requires them to actively listen to what their peers said.