Getting my students to engage with the Amplify Science curriculum feels like swimming upstream. Though the curriculum includes a relevant central mystery every unit that students have to solve, the actual content of the mystery is often dull, reducing science to clean water and rocks in the desert. Yes, those subjects are relevant to students’ lives in the literal sense, but they are not actually relevant to students’ concerns.
As Dr. Michael Wesch states in his TED Talk, three questions matter to students: Who am I? What am I going to do? Am I going to make it? In a world where students are exposed to the Internet from a young age, passively absorbing information about huge and stressful subjects like climate disasters (here is an article on climate anxiety in young people), vaccine misinformation, and AI, students’ concerns about whether they’ll “make it” or not are larger and more connected to the broader world than ever. I believe that it is the responsibility of science teachers and curriculum creators to teach students how to understand and form their own opinions on these topics.I want my students to develop a sense of agency — to feel like they can actually contribute to change, and that they are not just helpless logs floating on the river of capitalism towards climate apocalypse. Beyond the issue of relevance, we have also discussed in class how humans are meant to be curious, and will learn naturally if their curiosity is sparked (from Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk).
My issues with engagement are not because science is uncool, merely that science has been made mundane by the curriculum. I’m guessing that I would be hard-pressed to get even the most devoted middle school student to feel curious about water quality. But if you show a student a picture of a nuclear bomb exploding, they might want to know why it has a mushroom shape; or, if they watch a video of a polar bear hunting a seal, they might be curious about how the polar bear evolves to become better at catching prey. Information about this is readily available, but not much of it is available to a 7th grade reading level. Much of it is behind a paywall or in advanced academic language.
This is where technology comes in. I am currently between a techno-traditionalist and a techno-constructivist. I use the curriculum simulations and I encourage my students to do projects on Slides or Canva, or to make songs with BandLab. However, we’ve discussed in class how the idea of a “digital native” evolves over time as technology advances, and I believe “techno-traditionalist” is the same. Now, I believe it is techno-traditionalist to use simulations and slideshows in classrooms, and electronic gradebooks are the standard across my school district. A modern techno-constructivist has to think beyond the technology given to new technologies like short-form content and AI. This is what I aspire to do with my project.
When it comes to using AI, I have some hesitations. My primary concern is that the ease of access to answers will impact students’ critical thinking and their ability to form their own opinions based on evidence. AI has been linked to cognitive atrophy and worse decision-making skills (here is an article about recent research on this topic). Obviously, that is counterproductive to the skills I want students to gain from my classroom, such as critical thinking, logic, and communicating ideas. Due to the nature of the curriculum, it is all too easy to plug a question into AI and get an answer that seems right, or even find sample answers on Google. Thus, students disengage when they realize how little they actually have to think in order to learn this material.
However, I believe that students learn best when they are made to actively consider the relevance of facts instead of passively absorbing them. Castle and Ferreira (2015) define three types of scientific inquiry projects: structured inquiry, guided inquiry, and open inquiry. Structured inquiry is when the method and the answer are provided; guided is when either the method or answer are provided; and open is when neither are provided to students. Open inquiry leads to the greatest amount and depth of thinking and learning, if enough scaffolds are given.
I also believe students learn best when they’re encouraged to engage with complex issues. In one action research study, students were given a research project on a real-life epidemic, even students who didn’t start off engaged reported learning something new and seeing the importance of the work and the knowledge they gained (Conner, 2010).
I also believe that students will find science more engaging if they get to explore modern science — the cutting edge of innovation and ethical debates — and not just reachable but boring concepts. But naturally, the material has to be brought to a level that students understand. AI provides a useful way to do this for scientific articles, as stated in Larry Ferlazzo’s article about ways that AI can be used in education to simplify above-grade-level texts. Using AI also means that MLLs and students at a lower reading level or with slower processing can access the content of advanced articles without worrying so much about the vocabulary. Thus, in my project, I plan to use Perplexity AI to help students access and reduce the complexity of the content of scientific articles as they research a real-world issue related to curriculum topics.
What would the project look like? In the ecosystems unit, students would research one way that humans are impacting the environment or one way scientists are trying to prevent environmental harm. For the chemical reactions unit, students would research a real-life chemical reaction that is relevant to healthcare, technology, or daily life. To circumvent the instinct many of them have to use AI for all parts of a project, I will create a strict procedure outlining exactly when and how technology is to be used. Students will find their articles on Google Scholar (or the articles would be teacher-provided for students who require more scaffolds), simplify them to a 7th grade reading level with Perplexity AI using a scripted series of prompts (as we’ve discussed in class), and use the simplified version to take notes on key ideas on paper. Then, students would use only their notes on paper to form their own opinion, and I would check off this part of the project. Finally, students would be allowed to use devices to create their presentation, but they would be blocked from Google during this portion of the project so that the information only came from their notes and their prior knowledge. I hope that this will allow my students to see AI as a tool but not the end product, as they will have to form their own opinion and support it with evidence from the articles; and I hope that my students learn through the opinion-forming portion that they are allowed and encouraged to have opinions and they can take initiative to inform themselves about difficult topics. Child development researchers point to AI as a useful scaffold for development if it is accompanied by a challenge to critically think, so I hope my project provides enough of that challenge while still making use of the benefits of AI in a techno-construcitivist way.
Overall, I hope that this teaches my students to have media, AI, and science literacy. Specifically, I hope that they see that science is not just a list of facts that they have to learn, but a way that people are trying to understand and improve the world.
References:
Castle, M. A., & Ferreira, M. M. (2015). Middle school science teachers’ perspectives and practices related to science as inquiry: A case study. Journal of Ethnographic & Qualitative Research, 10(1), 13–28.
Conner, J. O. (2010). If You Require It, Will They Learn from It? Student Perceptions of an Independent Research Project. History Teacher, 43(4), 585–594.
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