Students will investigate the characteristics of electromagnetism and then use what they learn to plan and conduct an experiment on electromagnets.
MS-PS2-3 Ask questions about data to determine the factors that affect the strength of electric and magnetic forces. Clarification Statement: Examples of devices that use electric and magnetic forces could include electromagnets, electric motors, or generators. Examples of data could include the effect of the number of turns of wire on the strength of an electromagnet, or the effect of increasing the number or strength of magnets on the speed of an electric motor. Assessment Boundary: Assessment about questions that require quantitative answers is limited to proportional reasoning and algebraic thinking.
This resource is explicitly designed to build towards this performance expectation.
Comments about Including the Performance Expectation The lesson plan specifically asks students to think about electricity and about magnetism. Further, students ask questions about data (based on observations made with a basic electromagnet), as a springboard to designing their own experiments about electromagnet strength. They then use the data they collect in their own experiment to support or reject their hypothesis. The lesson plan as written implies great freedom in designing experiments; strangely, the student handout is a “follow-the-directions” activity. A teacher will need to modify the student handout by removing the existing “Testable Question” from the Electromagnet Planning Sheet, removing the second page (specific directions for changing the number of winds of wire), and modifying the data table on the third page to remove the pre-set row labels.
This resource is explicitly designed to build towards this science and engineering practice.
Comments about Including the Science and Engineering Practice This Practice is explicit in the lesson plan as written, but not in the student handout as written. During the lesson, students plan and carry out investigations into strengths of electromagnets. The first portion of the student design process (the “Four Questions Strategy”) is faithful to the ideas of NGSS: working individually and collaboratively (see lesson plan for each of these), identifying variables and controls. The second portion of the student activity (“Electromagnet Planning Sheet”) as it stands gives a narrow question to answer (how will the number of turns of wire affect the strength of the electromagnet?), perhaps more appropriate for lower elementary students to see the correlation between their brainstorming and an “actual experiment”. At the middle school level, teachers will need to modify this second portion to allow for more open-ended, student- conceived and student-designed investigations. See the Teacher Tips for the Performance Indicator for details about how to modify this lesson.
This resource is explicitly designed to build towards this disciplinary core idea.
Comments about Including the Disciplinary Core Idea Students are experimenting to discover what factors can affect the strength of their electromagnet, and thus the size of the force (number of paper clips that can be picked up). Students may need to be reminded or taught that the magnetic forces they measure in the lab are a result of electric force from the battery/wire circuit. Depending on the specific experiments chosen by different groups, this connection may become obvious during a class discussion of experiments and findings.
This resource appears to be designed to build towards this crosscutting concept, though the resource developer has not explicitly stated so.
Comments about Including the Crosscutting Concept Students are using the idea of cause and effect to predict (hypothesize) what will happen when they make changes to their electromagnet. The implication is that “doing something” to the electromagnet (cause) makes “something different” happen (effect), and that the effect can be predicted in advance (hypothesis). The exact language of cause and effect is not used and will need to be pointed out by the teacher as students design experiments.