Assessment
This introductory activity has several opportunities for formative assessment:
- Use the ideas students share about patterns in the Keeling curve (Slide 9) as a “baseline” for where their understanding is at this point. Even with the jigsaw activity in Lesson 2, students may still be “warming up” to the data presented in this graph. Use this activity to determine where their ideas are at this point in the unit. They may still be uncertain about what the two different lines in the graph mean and represent, and what causes the patterns.
- Students’ ideas about the questions on Slide 11 will give you an initial view of how students are thinking about the causes for the patterns in the Keeling curve. This will be the main focus for Activities 4.3 and 4.5.
- Students’ answers to the Big Ideas Probe will provide an initial view of students’ approaches to predicting how changes in fossil fuel emissions will affect CO2 concentrations in the future. This will be the main focus for Activities 4.4 and 4.5.