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The Air Up There

The Science Teacher—April/May 2010

To engage students in a real-world issue (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 2000) that affects their communities, the author designed an entire unit to investigate air pollution in their home state, Connecticut. The unit’s goal is to understand how the use of resources, such as fossil fuels, might affect their quality of life. Through this unit, students are able to tackle real-world problems while improving their understanding of both science and technology, particularly as they relate to societal issues (NRC 1996). The 5E Learning Cycle—engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate—provides the framework for this inquiry-oriented unit (Audet and Jordan 2003; Bybee et al. 2006).
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