The Scientific Method PBL

This Scientific Method PBL is an engaging, problem-based inquiry activity that gets your students utilizing the Scientific Method to solve a real-life problem and learn to think critically. Designed for science students in the middle and high school grades, this activity is NGSS, Common Core, and STEM-aligned and uses common experiences and materials to apply your lessons in a meaningful way. Your resource is fully editable and can be uploaded to your class site or printed for students' use.

Learning Goals:

- Design a clear and concise experiment that can be used to solve a real-world problem

- Determine the difference between accuracy and precision

- Perform tasks commonly used in physics labs, namely: calculating the mean and standard deviation, determining modes, creating data tables, and graphing data

Prerequisites:

- Solving algebraic equations

This activity will motivate and engage your students and force them to think critically, analyze a common situation, apply what they’ve learned in a meaningful way, problem-solve and work collaboratively.

In this activity, your student's job is to:

1) Apply what they have learned both inside and outside the classroom to solve the posed problem in the best way possible

2) Conduct their own research to decide if they need to learn anything else in order to solve the problem

3) Make sure they answer all the questions you asked them by collecting data and providing evidence and reasoning for their responses.

Your complete resource includes a student and teacher version. The student version contains the basic information they can use to design and carry out their experiment. The teacher version includes the answer key, look-fors as well as teacher tips and tricks to make everything go smoothly.

If you have any questions, please send me an email – devon@teachwithfergy.com

1 zip file with 3 Word documents