Reply To: Yr 7 Inquiry Project in Science
[ASIDE] In terms of designing the worksheets, this was also an fascinating stage as we were deliberately building on materials that Year 7 had used in an English Science Fictional Writing inquiry the previous term because we wanted them to feel a sense of familiarity and continuity. This was intended in part to help the teachers, because if students were already familiar with the resource from a different context then the teachers could focus more on the content and less on teaching students to use the resource – it’s less distracting. However, crucially, it was also intended to help students to internalise the inquiry process as the stages become more familiar to them. The consistent colour scheme is very important here too.
The “identifying questions” sheet (attached to post above) went through six very different iterations before we were happy with it because, as we added the extra steps that would be important for the Science inquiry, we realised how important reading order is in tables and in trying to keep the sheet as close as possible to the original we were violating the natural “left-to-right then top-to-bottom” reading order and it became very confusing to use. I have attached an image of the English worksheet as well as the first two iterations of the Science sheet to this post show how it evolved. The final version is attached to the post above. Sometimes I think it can be helpful to share our mistakes and drafts because they reveal more of the design process than the final polished version…
