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Causal Patterns in Density; Understandings of Consequence
Project
 Lesson
at a Glance:
Curriculum: Understandings of Consequence Project,
Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education
Grade: Fifth
Topic: Causal Patterns in Density
Prior to this lesson, the students had been working with
the Arlington science specialist Nadine Solomon and their teacher Nicole
Scalzo in lessons on the nature of matter, states of matter, and what it
means in terms of particles for something to be a solid, liquid, or gas.
In
this lesson, by using brass and aluminum cylinders and controlling for
two variables — mass and volume — Tina made the property
of density more obvious to the students. She also began to address the
causes
for density differences in matter on the particle level, by asking the
students to draw their own models for what they think the particles of
the two materials would look like under what she called their “microscopic
eyes.”
Tina commented, “One of the critical challenges in
understanding density is that in addition to particle “crowdedness,” there's
differences between atoms, in terms of their mass. Eventually, the lessons
that we're doing today will lead into lessons on the nature of rising
and sinking. What we'll be trying to get the students to understand at
that
point is that it's the relationship between the density of the object
and the density of the liquid that accounts for whether it sinks or rises,
not just the density of the object itself.”
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