Energy is a critical component across science disciplines and a key element in developing a sophisticated understanding of scientific literacy.
The ELeVATE project was a four-year, $1.8 million project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) directed at middle school science students. This project built upon prior research into how students learn the energy concept. Drawing upon the Framework for K-12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), this project aims to support middle school students in developing a deep and useful understanding of energy by prioritizing the idea of energy transfer between systems.
The project team developed a new middle school unit to support students in using energy transfers between systems to interpret phenomena and solve problems. This unit emphasizes these ideas:
1. Identifying and representing systems
2. Energy transfer between systems
3. The role of fields in storing and transferring energy
In addition to instructional materials, the project team developed three-dimensional assessment tasks that gauge middle school students’ ability to use energy to make sense of phenomena and solve problems.
This project was a collaboration between CREATE for STEM Institute at Michigan State University, the Leibniz-Institute for Science and Mathematics Education (IPN) in Germany, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.
