Human Impact on Water Quality

Desired Results:

Students will be able to

  Identify the key factors that influence water quality

·         Explain how human activities can change the balance of a water ecosystem and affect the survival of organisms

·         Identify the relationships among factors affecting water quality

·         Explain how a factor affects the living organisms in a water ecosystem

·         Use credible cyber resources for data collection

·         Use ICTs to facilitate the process of identifying scientifically testable questions and locating valuable and accurate information

·         Use ICTs to support data organization, data analysis and data presentation, and draw conclusions

·         Use ICTs to communicate findings to the learning community using various media formats

Acceptable Evidence

·         Analyze and interpret data to provide evidence for the effects of resource availability on organisms and populations of organisms in an ecosystem

·         Construct an explanation that predicts patterns of interactions among organisms across multiple ecosystems.

·         Construct an argument supported by empirical evidence that changes to physical or biological components of an ecosystem affect populations.

Learning Activities

Day one- Pre inquiry discussion

·         Students will be grouped and brainstorm using their prior knowledge the effect of water quality on human activity.

·         Teacher will provide the students with overall strategies for conducting effective internet searches.

·         Students will research the direct and indirect impact of human behaviors on water ecosystems.

·         Students will then discuss its findings with the rest of the class.

Day two- Model the structured inquiry process

·         The teacher will model to the class the inquiry process.

Day three- Scaffold students guided inquiry research process

·         Teacher should guide students to develop scientifically researchable questions through researching on the internet and formulate the hypothesis by asking questions.

Day four- Initiated open-inquiry research process

·         Students will form a research question and a hypothesis.

·         They will then collect water-quality data from public cyber databases and examine their hypothesis using the evidence.

·         Students will enter their data in a spreadsheet and analyze it, create charts. They will examine their hypothesis and own conclusions. They will then share their findings with the rest of the class.