William+Gillespie+and+Katie+LaFrance

=Application Project Plan (APP) Planning Sheet=

__Name__: **William Gillespie and Katie LaFrance, Mary Nellenback and Erik Untiedt**

__Tentative Title:__ **Examining the "Pseudoscience" of UFOs**

__Target Audience__**: 8th graders**

__Curriculum Goals__**: Standard 1 - Analysis, Inquiry & Design** **Key Idea 1** **S.1 - Formulate questions independently with the aid of references appropriate for guiding the search for explanations of everyday observations** **S1.4 - Seek to clarify, to assess critically, and to reconcile with their own thinking the ideas presented by others, including peers, teachers, authors, and scientists.**

__Media Literacy Goals:__


 * 1.) To analyze specific websites for source credibility (authorship, purpose, copyright, etc.) **
 * 2.) To be able to evaluate the components of a website, through media decoding, to determine whether any of them do/do not meet the criteria to be considered scientific. **

__Other Goals:__

**ELA Language for Information and Understanding Std 1**: Students will listen, speak, read, and write for information and understanding. As listeners and readers, students will collect data, facts, and ideas; discover relationships, concepts, and generalizations; and use knowledge generated from oral, written, and electronically produced texts.

**ELA Language for Critical Analysis and Evaluation Std 3:** Students will listen, speak, read, and write for critical analysis and evaluation. As listeners and readers, students will analyze experiences, ideas, information, and issues presented by others using a variety of established criteria. In this case, students will analyze and evaluate media messages (websites/video segments) using a standard set of questions and form opinions about what these messages are about.

**Correcting misconceptions about what constitutes "science"**


 * Creating relevance between the scientific process and students' lives**

__ Proposed Activities: __ Add activities related to the student productions.
 * Evaluating the validity of specific source ("websites") claims through a checklist (see Berkely toolkit list)**. Seems very focused and doable.

__ Assessment/Evaluation: __

__ Resources/Support that will help you in your development of the APP: __

Understanding Science "how science really works" Website: http://undsci.berkeley.edu/index.php

Mutual UFO Network website: http://www.mufon.com/


 * Compiling lists of media resources (specifically websites) for topics which are pseudoscience as well as valid science (but seem like pseudoscience)**


 * __ Difficulties/Obstacles to developing your APP: __**
 * 4 people collaborating from 2 different schools....just making time to meet/share info** Not easy!

__ Planning Steps: __ 1**. Librarian will meet with students for 1-2 class periods (pre-teaching the media literacy part of project). In one class period the students will be presented with information on literacy & media validity. The next class period, students will be given an example and asked to practice checking for validity and looking for bias using the key questions.* we may also try to involve Social Studies in the process by having them look at media literacy in their classrooms as well, so students are exposed to various types** ** impressive goal ** * **Potentially librarians will have students look at Wikipedia and teach them how to use it/scrutinize the information presented on topics. They will be shown the website disclaimer and how to check sources listed for information.**
 * 2. Students will be randomly selected and put in pairs in science class. Each pair will choose a topic (pre-selected by teachers) to research. It may or may not be pseudoscience (we are planning a 60/40 mix of about 20 topics we have chosen). We will also give students some direction as to the websites/materials to look at for information about their topic. A creative and exciting approach **

Coaching Notes 12/21

The team will come on the 6th with a document to decode, goals for the decoding and specific questions and follow-up probe questions for analyzing that document. For the “Examining Pseudoscience” project they need to find documents to use for an intro to “the scientific method”. This should include some docs that show “the scientific method” and documents that are NOT science (e.g. faith, impression, hope) as well as “pseudoscience” documents that say or suggest that they are “scientific”. The teachers will lead students through analysis of some docs in class then have the students decode and present other docs. Then students will create (flip) videos to present to the class demonstrating their understanding, perhaps as “reporters”. Chris is offering to have the Ithaca College intern, Michelle, look for documents. The team will need to send clear criteria for her research to Chris. The team should also look at the other LSTA APPS and communicate with other groups who may be finding useful documents. Since these lessons will ultimately be part of an intro to science at the beginning of the school year, the team will only be able to try out some decoding this spring but not actually implement the unit till the beginning of the next school year.

Is this the sequence you had in mind? Cclassroom decoding of a few documents (led by teachers) to teach the analysis process. 1) Students work in teams to analyze a particular document provided by the teacher. 2) Students prepare video presentations analyzing their document. 3) The rest of the class analyzes each document before each team presents their video that includes their analysis of the document.