March 25, 2014 nal Psychology
Final Paper Plan

The Scientific Method
This will be a classroom activity for students in the fourth grade. This will be the main hands-on activity to solidify a concept that students have learned vaguely throughout their school years and are mastering this year. Students will have spent two weeks previous to this activity learning about the scientific method and how to apply it on a daily basis. Students at this point should be very comfortable with the subject matter and will, as a group, be conducting the activity. The students will be placed with a partner to do this activity. Special attention will be placed on which students are placed together. I will try to place students with a partner that will be beneficial to them or vice versa. Each group will get an experiment set-up to perform the experiment step as a group and as individuals so they get a better grasp of the ideas. The entire activity will be done in a question answer style. I will ask which step goes first then second and so on and as a group they will answer. After each group response to the step I will ask for specifics of the step, how, why, etc., I will ask for students to raise their hands to give these answers. I will engage multiple students even if we have already established the answer. I will also call on students who have not raised their hands to ask if they agree with what the other students have answered, I will not ask these students to go in detail or explain “why” they agree. The purpose of this will be to keep all student s engaged and involved with the activity. I will pay special attention to be sure any students who need extra help get it during this time both from myself and peer interaction. The activity should take about an hour possibly a little longer if students are highly engaged. The information being evaluated will be an assigned topic that we have touched on. The research information will be readily available in our classroom as it will come from a lesson we are currently learning about for example magnetic polarity, static electricity or water displacement measuring.
The manner in which this activity is conducted will provide a platform for students to demonstrate what they know with prompts and directed questions. Once the subject matter is established it gives the children the opportunity to embellish what they know. With myself there conducting the activity I can clear up misconceptions and guide the students into the right direction. At this point the students should have good knowledge of the scientific method. This activity will help to solidify the steps and give them a memory to call back on any time they use the steps in the future. This hands on step by step approach gives all students the opportunity to become familiar with the steps. Since the only writing students have to do is write their hypothesis, I will list several of their answers on the board as well, it gives students with reading/writing difficulties the chance to familiarize without the struggle of reading or writing. Additionally, this activity comes after weeks of very structured and guided learning. Each step had days just