CK-12 Foundation - NanoSense Teacher Materials

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ISBN :978-1-935983-62-0

Authors
Patricia Schank, Tina Stanford

Website
http://nanosense.org/

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Contents

• For Anyone Planning to Teach Nanoscience...Read This First!
• Size Matters Overview and Learning Goals
• Unit at a Glance: Suggested Sequencing of Activities by Day for the Full Set of Size Matters Curriculum Materials
• Alignment of Unit Activities with Learning Goals
• Alignment of Unit Activities with Curriculum Topics
• Alignment Chart: Key Knowledge and Skills
• (Optional) Size Matters Pretest/Posttest: Teacher Answer Sheet

Nanoscience Defined

Nanoscience is the name given to the wide range of interdisciplinary science that is exploring the special phenomena that occur when objects are of a size between and in at least one dimension. This work is on the cutting edge of scientific research and is expanding the limits of our collective scientific knowledge.

Nanoscience is Science-in-the-Making

Introducing students to nanoscience is an exciting opportunity to help them experience science in the making and deepen their understanding of the nature of science. Teaching nanoscience provides opportunities for teachers to:

• Model the process scientists use when confronted with new phenomena
• Address the use of models and concepts as scientific tools for describing and predicting chemical behavior
• Involve students in exploring the nature of knowing: how we know what we know, the process of generating scientific explanations, and its inherent limitations
• Engage and value our student knowledge beyond the area of chemistry, creating interdisciplinary connections

One of the keys to helping students experience science in action as an empowering and energizing experience and not an exercise in frustration is to take what may seem like challenges of teaching nanoscience and turn them into constructive opportunities to model the scientific process. We can also create an active student-teacher learning community to model the important process of working collaboratively in an emerging area of science.

This document outlines some of the challenges you may face as a teacher of nanoscience and describes strategies for turning these challenges into opportunities to help students learn about and experience science in action. The final page is a summary chart for quick reference.

Challenges & Opportunities

1. You will not be able to know all the answers to student (and possibly your own) questions ahead of time...

Nanoscience is new to all of us as science teachers. We can (and definitely should) prepare ahead of time using the resources provided in this curriculum as well as any others we can find on our own. However, it would be an impossible task to expect any of us to become experts in a new area in such a short period of time or to anticipate and prepare for all of the questions that students will ask.

...This provides an opportunity to model the process scientists use when confronted with new phenomena .

Since there is no way for us to become all-knowing experts in this new area, our role is analogous to the lead explorer in a team working to understand a very new area of science. This means that it is okay (and necessary) to acknowledge that we dont have all the answers. We can then embrace this situation to help all of our students get involved in generating and researching their own questions. This is a very important part of the scientific process that needs to occur before anyone steps foot in a lab. Each time we teach nanoscience, we will know more, feel more comfortable with the process for investigating what we dont know, and find that there is always more to learn.

One strategy that we can use in the classroom is to create a dedicated space for collecting questions. This can be a space on the board, on butcher paper on the wall, a question box or even an online space if we are so inclined. When students have questions, or questions arise during class, we can add them to the list. Students can be invited to choose questions to research and share with the group, we can research some questions ourselves, and the class can even try to contact a nanoscientist to help us address some of the questions. This can help students learn that conducting a literature review to find out what is already known is an important part of the scientific process.

2. Traditional chemistry and physics concepts may not be applicable at the nanoscale level...

One way in which both students and teachers try to deal with phenomena we dont understand is to go back to basic principles and use them to try to figure out what is going on. This is a great strategy as long as we are using principles and concepts that are appropriate for the given situation.

However, an exciting but challenging aspect of nanoscience is that matter acts differently when the particles are nanosized. This means that many of the macro-level chemistry and physics concepts that we are used to using (and upon which our instincts are based) may not apply. For example, students often want to apply principles of classical physics to describe the motion of nanosized objects, but at this level, we know that quantum mechanical descriptions are needed. In other situations it may not even be clear if the macroscale-level explanations are or are not applicable. For example, scientists are still exploring whether the models used to describe friction at the macroscale are useful in predicting behavior at the nanoscale (Luan & Robbins, 2005).