This is a great resource to have students engaged in inquiry. The structure of the labs and activities is designed after a "backward faded scaffolding" approach to inquiry. The students start off in the inquiry process in a structured manner to eventually collecting data from their own investigation to answer their own generated question to arrive at a conclusion.
More specifically, the scaffolding looks like:
1. Students start with examining data and deciding if the conclusion provided for the data set is supported by the data
2. Then, students are provided with a structure to collect data and determine a conclusion that the data supports
3. Then, students must collect data on their own with the goal of creating a conclusion to a researchable question
4. Then students can generate their question to research
This model not only works for astronomy but students could easily be engaged in this process in any scientific area. Furthermore, this a great way to introduce students to inquiry over a period of time.
Also, keep in mind this process will definitely be aided by having the data sets online researched in advance to be available to help the scaffolding!
thanks for breaking down the scaffolding into steps -- i'm trying to put together the student assignment for the week 4 task and this definitely helped me get organized in my head.
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