Use carefully chosen starter images to elicit student questions that are investigable with the given materials¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

Students view pictures of stars one at a time and write questions on large sentence strips; the questions are later sorted by category and students select one to investigate in pairs. The article explains: "The starters are pictures of stars in different astronomical situations which are meant to get the students to ask lots of questions, of which they will later choose one to investigate." Starter pictures are chosen to show stars of many colors and brightnesses, clusters of different colors, and blue young clusters with nebulosity, so the resulting questions address the content goals.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Facilitators may need to model what a good question looks like if it is students' first time asking questions
• Distractions such as diffraction spikes should be minimized in the images

Constraints¶

• Students have a hard time coming up with questions, so they are encouraged to write as many as possible

Target Learners¶

• advanced high-school students
• college students

Target Learning Goals¶

• question generation
• stellar populations content

Related Strategies¶

• Set aside off-topic student questions as QWWNDW ATTs and tell students in advance that many questions will fall in this category
• Sort And Classify

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Rafelski, M., Foley, M., Graves, G. J., Kretke, K. A., Mills, E., Nassir, M., & Patel, S. (2010). Teaching Astronomy with an Inquiry Activity on Stellar Populations. ASP Conference Series. https://arxiv.org/abs/1009.5404. doi:10.48550/arxiv.1009.5404