Tuesday 7 May 2013

Biology Plant Transpiration Lab Demo as a PEOE Activity

I am now a few weeks into my Senior Biology ABQ. I feel like teachables are equivalent to Pokemon for me. I 'gotta collect them all!'. This will be teachable number 5 (phys ed, history, general science, special education and now, biology). Let's hope there are not as many teachables as there are Pokemon :).

Anyways, I am beginning to prepare my culminating unit on Plants Anatomy, Growth and Function. I have chosen a plant transpiration lab demonstration. This can be done with various vascular plants, although those with large leaves would work better. Larger leaves allow for quicker transpiration (more stomata) and a more exciting lab! Yes, transpiration can be exciting! This is a teacher demonstration that aims to involve students more than traditional approaches to demonstrations in a science lab. This could also be turned into a student lab, though this would require more time and materials (that may or may not be available).

A brief overview of PEOE:
PEOE means Predict-Explain-Observe-Explain. Rather than traditional approaches to demonstrations in the science lab (passive student involvement, aka watching), students take an active role in the teacher demonstration. They predict what will happen in the experiment, then explain why they made that prediction. After observing the teacher demo, students will explain if and why there were any differences between their prediction and their observations. I have added some analysis

My Transpiration Lab Demo and Student Worksheet are located at this link:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7_9VFI4AVG6N1Q4NmlTcmUzbWM/edit?usp=sharing

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