Results I

Chapter 9: S-c-i-e-n-c-e in Our Class Spells Fun!

by Crystal Doi 

It is relatively uncommon for Grades K to 12 students to engage in scientific inquiry that is not only relevant to their own lives and experiences, but also to current groundbreaking research. This is just what teacher Crystal Doi’s students experienced when they set off to investigate the role of sleep in memory consolidation. Their hippocampal brain investigation focused the students on learning their spelling words, a task that suddenly gained in interest and popularity. Ms. Doi and her students achieved the More Emphasis condition of applying the results of experiments to scientific arguments and explanations. “By letting my student explain the meaning of the error bars to the class, the students were able to argue for their hypothesis based on the data they had collected.” “Doing data analysis as a class helped my students see clearly that their data were an argument for studying before sleeping, because there was a statistically significant difference in spelling test scores for that study group.”