Published: January 10, 2024
Dallas Students Continue to Apply STEELS Standards During Pilot Program
District students at the intermediate and middle school level continue to experience science education aligned with the PA STEELS (Pennsylvania Integrated Standards for Science, Technology & Engineering, and Environmental Literacy and Sustainability, and Pennsylvania Technology and Engineering) Standards using OpenSciEd materials.
The PA STEELS Standards emphasize phenomenon based learning, a model that seeks to engage students by presenting an event or observable phenomenon and working to explore and explain it while arriving at science concepts later.
During a recent third grade unit on balanced and unbalanced forces, students were shown a phenomenon of a toy sculpture that was built on a single lego block. Throughout the unit, students investigated by constructing different sculptures with different variables to understand how balanced and unbalanced forces work. This new approach to teaching science gives students an opportunity to make observations and ask questions, and then design investigations to test their questions. Students naturally develop content knowledge as they participate in this approach to learning science. Pictures below were captured during the student activities. For more information regarding the STEELS Standards visit https://www.pdesas.org/Page/Viewer/ViewPage/58/
