Fourth-Grade Scientists Investigate Electric Circuits

by: Trisha Kagey Boswell

Trisha Kagey Boswell is a third-grade teacher at an elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland, where she has taught for eight years. Her school is an art-integrated magnet school. When she wrote this chapter, she was a first-year teacher, teaching fourth grade. She reflects on trying to create in her own classroom the inquiry experiences she enjoyed in a physics course as part of her preservice program. She also describes her efforts at tracking the influence of such inquiry-based instruction by documenting changes in her students’ understandings of what scientists do. Writing in the middle of a unit on electric circuits, she comments upon what they had done so far, describes what they were in the process of doing, and anticipates an event in which the students would be communicating their findings.

Details

Type Book ChapterPub Date 1/1/2007Stock # PB214X_3

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