Alignment With Three-Dimensional and Phenomenon-Based Learning

For example, the middle grades module Kinetic and Potential Energy is organized around an anchoring phenomenon: a roller coaster that cannot complete its loops because it lacks sufficient energy. Students return to this problem across the module as they investigate how energy is stored, transferred, and transformed in different systems. Students stretch rubber bands by different amounts to test how elastic potential energy affects motion, drop balls from different heights to investigate gravitational potential energy, and roll cars of different masses down ramps to explore how mass affects energy transfer during collisions. Throughout their investigations, students record measurements, compare trials, graph and analyze data, identify patterns, and use evidence to support claims. Additionally, students develop and use models, including diagrams, energy representations, and a digital roller coaster simulation, to explain how kinetic and potential energy change within a system. By the end of the module, students apply evidence from their hands-on investigations and models to explain how the roller coaster can be redesigned to work. 

The Kinetic and Potential Energy module also illustrates CSEL Science’s inquiry-based learning approach. Students encounter a problem: A roller coaster cannot complete its loops. This problem gives students a reason to investigate how energy works in a system. Throughout the module, students explore focused questions such as how height, mass, speed, and elasticity affect energy and motion. They conduct hands-on investigations with rubber bands, dropped balls, and collisions; record and compare data; identify patterns; and use evidence to support claims. In the culminating session, students use a digital roller coaster simulation to test changes to the system and explain how those changes affect the roller coaster’s motion. This sequence supports sustained sensemaking: Students build understanding over time, revise their ideas as they gather evidence, and use scientific models and data to explain a meaningful real-world problem. 

The Great Rift Valley in east Africa is home to many saltwater lakes and also the famously pink Lesser Flamingo. But there is now only one lake, Lake Natron in Tanzania, that is a suitable breeding ground for this species.

In this module, students explore the difficult choices communities face as they decide whether to build a factory at Lake Natron. A similar factory was built years ago at nearby Lake Magadi in Kenya and students learn about the effect it had on the flamingos at that salt lake.

This module consists of seven sessions intended to develop students’ knowledge about how different environments support a variety of organisms and how biodiversity contributes to the sustainability of an ecosystem.

This module introduces students to ecological disturbances through the real-world occurrence of invasive brown tree snakes in Guam.

Students learn that some disturbances are natural, and others are caused by human actions. Following a disturbance, there is usually a recovery. These recoveries can occur with or without human action. Students see how human intervention in some problems can cause unintended consequences. 

Students explore how energy flows through an ecosystem, using models like food chains, food webs, and energy pyramids. Students apply their knowledge by constructing a food web using the Chesapeake Bay as a case study. Then, students link this learning to the invasive tree snakes in Guam by investigating how other species are impacted.