5 Teaching Science Project Tips for Gifted Learners
Strategies and techniques are presented along with examples of how to apply each strategy in teaching gifted and talented learners in science at all grade levels.
Teaching science through a balance of content and process considerations is essential for gifted learners. This emphasis must include original student investigations, concept development, and interdisciplinary applications. This emphasis on gifted and talented learning must include laboratory-based science as a central tenet for providing high quality learning opportunities in science education at all levels.
Collaborative teaching science opportunities work well with gifted and talented learners, along with the need to provide structured collaborative opportunities for these learners. Teaching strategies must challenge gifted learners through problem based learning activities, which create critical thinking situations. Science education curriculum elements essential for high ability learners include the following five tips.
Teaching Strategies
By structuring science curriculum to emphasize science learning designed for gifted and talented learners, students learn at deeper levels than just fundamental ideas. Concepts such as systems, change, and scale all provide an important scaffolding of learning regarding core ideas of science.
One teaching science example involves gifted learners sitting in the classroom working on a project. Ask them “Do my project for me”, — what they did answer?
Ask them how fast they are traveling? Suppose they are sitting on the North Pole, now how fast are they traveling? Answers to both questions require an understanding of the concepts rotational speed and orbital speed of the earth. Suppose students have special suits that allow them to stand on the sun. How fast are they traveling now? Learners need to understand the rotational speed of the Milky Way.
Science and Society
Gifted and talented learners must learn to make connections between science concepts and their world. Learners need to analyze the relationship between real world problems and implications for understanding connections between science and society. Experiments, surveys, role playing, case studies, and debates are some of the processes gifted learners can use to address issues.
One teaching science example focuses on gifted learners studying the impact of food technology and its long term impact on humans.
Students need to make connections between diseases caused by technology advances for growing food, impact of food shortages around the world, impact of genetic alteration of foods, and impact of fertilizers on the environment.
Problem Based Learning
The more that gifted and talented learners construct understanding about science for themselves, the better they are able solve problems through applications of scientific processes in problem based learning activities. Teacher guided questions, collaborative dialogue and discussions, and individual exploration allows students to develop the habits of mind of scientists. These habits include skepticism, objectivity, and curiosity.
One teaching science example focuses on air quality from a local, national, and international perspective.
Gifted learners focus on real world solutions regarding controlling carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and all the other pollutants that cause air pollution.
Science and Technology
The use of technology to teach science offers some exciting possibilities for connecting students to real world opportunities. Internet access provides students with connections to real time data bases for teaching using online science projects. Also the use of e-mail, Twitter, and Skype provides learners with the tools to communicate directly with scientists and other students around the world.
One example teaching strategy using technology includes the use of virtual chemistry lab for conducting experiments with resources that are not typically available in a gifted and talented classroom.
Science Projects
Science projects must focus on experimental design and its related processes. Typically, texts only offer canned experiments where students follow the steps to a preordained conclusion. Designing their own work in science requires gifted and talented learners to read and discuss a particular topic of interest, then they must:
- come up with a problem to test
- design a experiment to test the problem
- follow through with appropriate procedures
- conduct further discussion
- reanalyze the problem
- communicate findings to a relevant audience
One example is based on designing an experiment to test how a plant’s growth is impacted when subjected to only red, orange, yellow, green, yellow, or blue light.
Making Connections with Gifted and Talented Learners and Science Education
Appropriate science education curriculum that promotes high quality learning is desirable for gifted and talented learners, along with all other learners. Access to such learning is mandatory for all learners demonstrating a strong desire for a challenging science curriculum in schools.
Gifted and talented learners must be challenged using teaching strategies that cause these students to use critical thinking skills, focus on resolving science problems that impact society, and use technology as a focal point to resolve science issues that require inquiry into science systems, change, and scale.
