Thanks Chris. This was a particularly interesting collaboration for me because six years ago I was a Physics teacher delivering the CREST project to my Year 7 Junior Science groups, and now I am part of the Library team supporting the Science staff in moving it forward into an inquiry paradigm. Students had always enthusiastically embraced the practical side of the project – with varying degrees of success, but most had emerged with some sense of fair testing and a ‘solution’ of some kind. As a collaborative team (as Chris has mentioned) we felt that the weak point in the current project was that students did not consistently connect the theory of heat transfer that they had been taught in the first part of the unit with their practical work and use the practical phase as an opportunity to move their understanding of heat transfer forward. Chris did some excellent work on the Connect and Wonder phases to explicitly support students to use their knowledge of heat transfer to steer their experimental design (see attached image).
Looking back to when I taught this unit, I think that, as subject specialists, the connections between theory and practical are so obvious to us it is sometimes easy to forget that this is not always the case for the students. Without the prompt to slow down and think about what they are about to do and why before they get their hands on the equipment, experimental design will likely be reactive and driven by the first equipment that catches their imagination rather than thoughtful and systematic and driven by an understanding of theory. This is similar to the drive later in the inquiry cycle to get on with the Express stage rather than spend time constructing a new understanding based on the information they have found – which is why these are two critical stages for intervention and scaffolding.