Three-dimensional Learning Progression In this final lesson of the unit, students have completed the inquiry and application sequences for plant growth and movement. The activities in the previous lessons were designed to walk students through a cognitive apprenticeship model of Establishing the Problem, Modeling, Coaching, and Fading. The results of the unit posttest will help you determine if your students are ready to move on to the final stage: Fading. After the Fading stage, students will be expected to carry forward concepts from this unit into future units. If the results from your posttest imply that a majority of your students are still struggling with certain concepts, it might be valuable to return to some of the main concepts they are struggling with before moving on to the next Carbon TIME unit. Key Ideas and Practices for Each Activity Activity 6.1 is the first part of the Fading phase of the Application Activity Sequence, which provides students with important less-scaffolded practice with photosynthesis, biosynthesis, and cellular respiration in plants. Students should take more responsibility for their work than in lessons 4 and 5, which included the Modeling and Coaching phases. Students answer the Three Questions for different plants growing and moving using modified Explanations Tools, coordinating accounts at the macroscopic and atomic-molecular scales. Macroscopic scale accounts include these components: the structure of the system (the plant and its cells in this case) and the movement of materials through the system; the location where chemical change takes place; the materials involved in the chemical change: the reactants going in and the products coming out. Atomic-molecular scale accounts include three different ways of representing chemical change: molecular models, with twist ties to represent units of energy, that students used to physically rearrange the atoms of the reactants into the atoms of the products; a chemical equation that shows how atoms are rearranged into new molecules in a compact way (but does not account for energy); the Explanations Tool, which provides a way for students to account for changes in matter and energy in writing by answering the Three Questions. Activities 6.2 and 6.3 together make up the second part of the Fading phase of the Application Activity Sequence. In these activities, students write generalized explanations, which focus on the cellular scale, of how all plants grow, move, and function. Activity 6.4 includes summative assessment for the unit. You can track students’ progress by having them take the unit posttest (identical to the unit pretest) and comparing the results of the two assessments. Content Boundaries and Extensions
