01:00:00 Title Open
01:00:04 CORTRIGHT: I’m Dr. Daniel Cortright, I teach 8th grade science at Bedford Middle School in Westport, Connecticut. Today we’re going to do some discussions about science current events.
01:00:14 GFX
01:00:18 CORTRIGHT: The class that I like to do once every two weeks is something we call current science events. The objective is to get students to read about science and connecting that learning to things they’re doing in the classroom
01:00:32 BOY 1: Subatomic particles known as neutrinos were clocked going faster than the speed of light.
01:00:37 CORTRIGHT: So remember when we talked about measurement, about how it’s important to try to measure to the sensitivity of your instrument? Think about what these scientists have to do to measure sixty nanoseconds.
01:00:50 CORTRIGHT: The current events, uh idea is to sort of excite them further about what science can be.
01:00:58 CORTRIGHT: We’re contributing to discussion because discussion’s cool and I’m keeping track of that, and I want to have people who haven’t presented yet, present. Anybody read something that’s just totally awesome that you want to…? Jessie.
BOY 2: It’ll blow your mind.
CORTRIGHT: Excellent
01:01:18 CORTRIGHT: First we’ll do a read through and then what they really need to do is to try to find three key ideas. In language arts it would often be referred to as the main idea.
01:01:27 CORTRIGHT: OK let’s do the key ideas.
JESSIE: My first key idea is these dolphins have dimples that can detect electric fields that help them find food in murky water.
00:01:35 CORTRIGHT: And then the other aspect is they then have to summarize those ideas in a way that gives some detail, some ideas about why they thought those ideas were so key or so important.

00:01:45 CORTRIGHT: Okay, so, we need to get the amount of sleep. So how are they going to get that data?
JESSIE: They could set a timer when they go to sleep and then check it when they wake up.
CORTRIGHT: Okay, yeah. It’s called self-report.
01:01:56 CORTRIGHT: Another objective is to prepare students to be independent investigators in the laboratory.
01:02:04 GIRL 1: Two thirds of teenagers in the US that get less than eight hours of sleep are more likely to have bad behavior. Studies show that over twelve thousand teens are sixty-eight point nine percent reported in a survey that they sleep less than eight hours on an average school night.
01:02:20 CORTRIGHT: During discussion, we then ask students who are listening to discussion to write down what they hear are the three key ideas.
01:02:27 CORTRIGHT: Ok. Who , who get eight hours of sleep every night? Oh what’s this?
BOY 2: Eight hours
GIRL 2: It varies.
CORTRIGHT: Who, who is in the sleep deprived camp? You’re getting six hours of sleep, so maybe there’s some rel- something that connects to what you do on a daily basis here. I mean these are big time scientists doing big time cool stuff, but they still are worrying about independent and dependent variables. What’s the independent variable?
01:02:54 CORTRIGHT: Hey you read this article and you thought it was pretty cool, but let’s look at that. There’s an independent variable. There’s a dependent variable. There are controls, there are constants. And I think the students are developing a greater grasp of what those concepts mean.
01:03:10 CORTRIGHT: They’re trying to measure the amount of sleep. And what is the dependent variable? Zoe.
ZOE: How it affects their behavior?
01:03:17 CORTRIGHT: And then the last thing that they do is, they’ll do a tweet.
01:03:20 CORTRIGHT: Scientists can be really critical about each other’s work. And what we’re doing right now is identifying some of those issues. So this would be a good time to try to write a science tweet.
01:03:30 CORTRIGHT: We’re also trying to do is take advantage of 21st century social technology and encourage them to develop skills as paraphrasing and summarizing in a very short sort of sentence or phrase, and the tweet is a way to sort of reinforce that.
01:03:44 BOY 3: My article is called worms, your unlikely allies.
01:03:48 CORTRIGHT: The idea the kids really like is hey we’re doing something that’s a little different, a little unique. We can be a little more relaxed, we can actually discuss, and we can be in control of the learning.
01:04:02 BOY 4: I was wondering how you can measure someone fighting.
01:03:05 CORTRIGHT: That is something you can measure isn’t it? Could we measure grumpiness?
BOYS: Yeah. Yeah.
CORTRIGHT: Oh really? We’re going to come up with the grumpiness- the Francis grumpiness index?
BOY 5: I was thinking more you could measure it of like different people in my family ones like maximum grumpiness, and the other ones like low grumpiness.
01:04:20 CORTRIGHT: What that means is that we’re making a standard. We’re saying this, this is really grumpy. Doctor Cortright with no coffee at 6:45 in the morning, that’s grumpy. OK? Matt, after getting an A plus on his science quiz, that’s not grumpy. Somewhere in between, we would define standards, that’s how you do measurements.
01:04:43 CORTRIGHT: One of my colleagues told me that I can’t tell who’s having more fun the students or you, and, and that’s probably a pretty fair summary.
01:04:51 CREDITS