• INQUIRY & INVESTIGATION Using Local Research as a Phenomenon in the Classroom LILY APEDAILE ABSTRACT Model-based inquiry, inquiry-based learning, and phenomenon are all popular terms in K–12 science education right now. Science education in our public education system is rapidly changing due to the implementation of the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). These standards ask teachers to move away from direct instruction to having students develop their understanding of the natural world through guided-learning activities. Under NGSS, students are expected to develop this understanding through one of the main scientific practices, model building, which requires a complex, real-world phenomenon to drive the learning experience. Phenomena work best in the classroom when they apply to students’ lives and pique their interest. Finding such phenomena can be hard – especially finding ones that have not already been thoroughly explained on the internet. A great way to find a complex, real- world phenomenon that will interest students is to partner with a local research lab to bring part of their research project into the classroom. This article lays out a process for bringing a local research project into the classroom and designing NGSS-aligned curricula around this project to create a more authentic learning experience for high school students. Key Words: phenomena; authentic learning experience; model building; Next Generation Science Standards; NGSS; curriculum design; scientific process. ¡ Introduction In recent years, concerns have been raised about the state of science education in the United States. Now more than ever, the general American public is responsible for making decisions that affect scientific policy, funding, and several other scientific areas. It has been noted that the American public lacks a clear understanding of how science is conducted or of the basic principles that make up the scientific field of study. Most Americans receive their scientific information from secondary sources such as newspapers, maga- zines, television, and the internet. This information has been fil- tered from primary scientific literature sources and may get distorted during this filtering process (Hoskins, 2010). Because scientific policy decisions rely so heavily on American public perception, it is important that students have a solid understanding of the nature of science and how to interpret and analyze scientific information. The goal of the Framework for K–12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) is to transform science education to move away from lecture and regurgitation of scientific facts and toward having students develop a scientific understand- ing of the world around them through their own engagement in the entire scientific process (National Research Council, 2012; NGSS Lead States, 2013). One major focus of this new instructional shift is to incorporate scientific phenomena into curricula. Students are introduced to a complex, scientific phenomenon at the beginning of a unit of study and work collaboratively to develop an initial model that explains what they think is happening. The students then use the various scientific practices and crosscutting concepts to gather evidence to revise and finalize their model by the end of the unit. The phenomenon used needs to be relevant and perplex- ing to the students in order to engage them in the discovery process of developing a final model (Windschitl et al., 2008). Choosing a phenomenon that is both complex and relevant to the students is a challenging aspect of designing curricula that align with the new standards. I was fortunate to spend two summers working in a local university research laboratory whose work is focused on discovering potential pharmaceutical drug compounds from extremophiles growing in the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana (Kharwar et al., 2011; Stierle et al., 2017). Part of this research experience was to incorporate what I learned while working in the lab into my high school classroom. This gave me the inspiration to design my curriculum units around the research occurring in the lab as a phenomenon. By using a local research project that is centered on an environmental disaster (Berkeley Pit), students are more likely to buy into the phenomenon and find it relevant, compared to using a phenomenon that is more generalized. Students in my honors sophomore biology class engaged in a yearlong research project that supports the Stierle lab’s research focus on discovering new microbes and potential antibiotic l 614 THE AMERICAN BIOLOGY TEACHER VOLUME 82, NO. 9, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020 The American Biology Teacher, Vol. 82, No. 9, pp. 614–618, ISSN 0002-7685, electronic ISSN 1938-4211.  2020 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2020.82.9.614. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/abt/article-pdf/82/9/614/440321/abt.2020.82.9.614.pdf by guest on 20 May 2021