Quan vs Qual

Students in grades 4-5-6 have started the school year learning about quantitative and qualitative data collection and strengthening their skills around experimental design.

Grade 4

Grade 4 students were outside collecting data from the natural world. They created tables to organize their data and spent time sharing their strategies for measuring and taking observational data.

Students are shown here working in their science notebooks.  Almost everything we do in science class will go into this notebook.  Science notebooks are a tool for CDS science students to make predictions, take notes, create data tables and graphs, make technical drawings, and form evidence -based explanations.  Grade 4 science students will continue their exploration of data as we grow our understanding of the metric system and measurement tools.

Grades 5 and 6

Students in the upper grades are further along in their knowledge of experimental design, but we still needed some refreshers on data collection and using science notebooks as a tool to share our findings.  Students in grades 5 and 6 took a *very* close look at the mealworms we use to feed the school's bearded dragon.  They took quantitative metric data such as the length, width, and height of their mealworms, used triple-beam balances to determine the mass, and got their first chance at creating technical drawings.  Next students will strengthen their understanding of variables and writing hypotheses as we progress in our conceptual framework of the experimental design process.