Description: Home Inquiry

Due: In Lab, week of August 30

Use paper clips but not staples. Print and copy on one side of the page and use standard–weight letter–sized paper. Put your name in the header of each document so that it appears on each page, and number pages. Please obtain a file or binder. Keep in it the drafts of each inquiry, and all the comments obtained from instructors and peers on each inquiry. Bring this file to each lab period.

Background. For this assignment, you need to perform a bit of scientific inquiry away from an academic setting. Write a paper (you can think of it as a lab write-up) that describes what you learned. It is up to you to decide what you will investigate, as well as the format for the write-up. The results do not have to be terribly long. One to two typed pages should do.

Selecting a topic: Here is the hard part. BE CURIOUS!! You do not need anything more than what can readily be accomplished around the house, dorm, or outdoors. Let your curiosity take hold and use Feynman for inspiration. However, do not carry out any project involving human subjects or vertebrate animals unless you verify with your instructor that there are no safety concerns with your idea.

Length: 1–2 typed pages Yes, you are being asked to do an assignment before you have learned anything in this course. This effort will give you an opportunity to find out just how much you already know, or don’t know, about science in action. If you take a look at the course outline, you will be learning about Experimental Design, Statistics, Modeling, and Presentation as the semester goes along. For now, though, please don’t do anything other than what you already know how to do. You can use this assignment for comparison with assignments you produce after you learn more. In other words, this write-up may not be very good, but that’s OK.

Comments: We are modeling the assessment technique of designing authentic pre- and post-assessments and comparing student work samples before and after a unit or course. While not all students perform well on standardized tests or other forms of traditional assessments, authentic assessments based on measurable change in student work provide an alternative and powerful measure of what students really know and can do after instruction.

Grading: This inquiry will be evaluated according to the Inquiry 1 Grading Checklist. This checklist has fewer items on it than the checklists that will be used as the course progresses. By the end you will be responsible for many elements of scientific research, but for the moment you will mainly be held accountable for a good-faith effort to investigate something, turn in the paper on time, and write the results up clearly. In most cases, including a graph is valuable to explain the results clearly