Monday 12th September
ASE Chat Summary
Topic 16 – What is the best science question that a pupil has ever asked you?
Answering Science Questions in the Classroom
Top Ten Tweets
It is helpful for teachers to be aware that some of the
questions that they get asked are good, wellformulated and interesting questions and some are
not. Teachers employ various strategies to get pupils
to re-formulate and improve their questions to make
them more ‘answerable’. Occasionally pupils ask
questions just as diversions, and some teachers get
pupils to ‘park’ their questions (by writing them on a
post-it note) to avoid disrupting the flow of the
lesson. One teacher did this during an observed lesson
and was marked down for ‘dismissing the pupil’s
question’. It is a good idea to use a ‘question box’
when teaching ‘Reproduction’, to enable quiet pupils
to ask questions that are potentially embarrassing.
“I asked my year 7&8s to post questions on our blog;
some good ones:
http://stocksbridgescience7.posterous.com/ ”
@agittner
Getting a STEM Ambassador in to answer questions in
a specialist field is a great way of giving pupils practice
in formulating questions and also stretching top sets.
http://www.stemnet.org.uk/
Problem-Based Learning (PBL) is popular in the US.
This academic article looks at the effectiveness of PBL:
http://aer.sagepub.com/content/48/5/1157.abstract?
rss=1
Science Question Sources
The Flying Circus of Physics by Jearl Walker (2nd edition
2007) contains 700 intriguing physics questions (and
answers). The book is currently out of print (?) but
there is a good website:
http://www.flyingcircusofphysics.com/
Does Anything Eat Wasps? Why Don’t Penguins’ Feet
Freeze? Do Polar Bears Get Lonely? and Why Can’t
Elephants Jump? are all published by Scientific
American. Each book contains over 100 science
questions. There’s a new photo-based book in the
series called Why are Orangutans Orange?
“Doing reproduction with Y7, a boy asked what
scroticles were for. I think that’s a great name for
them!” @NeedhamL56
“Working in a special school means the questions you
get asked are bizarre (and usually at a total tangent).
Feeling left out 2night” @cleverfiend
“Of course, most frequent Q is ‘What is making that
sound?’ Invariably it is the guinea fowl” @13loki
“PGCE suggestion seems to be 'can we direct the
question back to the class' to promote learning &
discussion, but only if relevant!” @MrsSPannell
“@agittner find students listen a lot more if you're
speaking about yourself e.g. diabetes in family when
doing diet/disease” @mwnm
“Love Hidden Science Futuremorph, reminds me of a
colleague who used photos of everyday things to ask
science questions” @bassoonist
“Find giving meaningful explanations of 'what energy
is' to KS3 kids v challenging. What it does is easy, but
what it is?” @teachitso
“@teachitso @agittner the need to know what energy
is - not the answer. to understand physics properly
you have to "get" the concept” @phys1cs
“The weirder the question the better. Give 'em an
answer, and keep the discussion going as long as
possible. Make them love science.” @teachitso
Primary Resource that @dannynic wanted to plug:
Hidden Science is a wonderful project run by
Futuremorph where pupils download a smartphone
app, submit science questions and then science
academics answer the questions. There are some
great questions (e.g. How heavy is a cloud?)
http://www.futuremorph.org/hiddenscience.cfm
Self-Study resources from the National Centre for
Initial Teacher Training in Primary School Science
(SCIcentre):
http://www.le.ac.uk/se/centres/sci/selfstudy/selfstud
y.html
Examples of Difficult Chemistry Questions
Why aren’t all chemical reactions exothermic?
If the world were solid, and you drilled a hole right
through, then dropped a stone down the hole what
would happen?
Why is copper(II) sulphate blue?
How many isomers are there for an alkane with n
carbon atoms?
How did life start?
How do oscillating clock reactions work?
Why is water at its most dense at 4°C?
Why does scratching initiate crystal formation?
What is the most reactive element?
Why is mercury a liquid at room temperature?
What is fire made of?
Why is the sky blue?
Why is water blue?
Why are ice cubes cloudy in the middle?
To repair the hole in the ozone layer, couldn’t we just
float a balloon full of ozone up and release it into the
stratosphere, over Antarctica?
Examples of Difficult Physics Questions
Why do car wheels sometimes appear to be going
backwards?
Why is lightning jagged?
Which has more heat energy an iceberg or a lit
match?
Why does paper make a noise when you tear it?
Why do your ears pop when you travel in a plane?
How can birds sit on high voltage power cables
without being electrocuted?
A sealed lorry with a cargo of live birds inside rests on
weighing scales. Bash the side of the lorry so the birds
take off. What happens to the measured downward
force?
Does a balloon weigh more or less at the top of a
mountain compared to at sea level?
When light "slows down" travelling through a dense
medium, where does the kinetic energy go? See
http://www.talkphysics.org/mod/groups/topicposts.p
hp?topic=17797&group_guid=13620
Does water travel clockwise or anticlockwise when
going down a plughole?