Students Questions as Drivers of Science Instruction

During the 2019–20 school year, Ms. Richmond taught 7th grade life science and 8th grade physical science courses at a large, suburban elementary- and middle-grades school in Arizona. In early 2020, as COVID was becoming a mainstream concern, Ms. Richmond endeavored to help students evaluate the merits of widely circulating misinformation about COVID. She explained that helping students think more critically about what they were hearing and where that information originated helped calm their fears about the virus:

I realized that they were getting tons of misinformation, and I said, “Well, we’ve got to start addressing where do you go to get the proper information?”. . . . They were suddenly just like, “It’s spreading, and it’s going all over the place,” and they were panicking from misinformation. So that gave me a chance to really focus in on that, as like, “How do you know if the information is correct? Where are you getting it from? What’s the source? How do you validate it? How do you verify it?” And so that was pretty important. They liked that because that really calmed them down. Because then they kept hearing rumors and they realized, “Wait a minute, that’s just a rumor. Let’s wait until we know something more definitive.”

Ms. Richmond also devoted instructional time to addressing student questions about the virus and equipping them with skills to find answers to their questions. As she explained:

I always took the time to answer their questions. . . . To not so much to respond to their questions, but to help them find the information that would lead to them getting answers to their questions. It was early and I felt at the time that, well, if things got better, then, you know, at least they’ll have some information. But if things got worse, it would be great for them to know where to get as much information as they could. And that was my real direction initially. It’s like, where do you get answers to your questions? What are the good questions to ask?

Student questions came to play an increasingly important role in Ms. Richmond’s science instruction, particularly in relation to how viruses spread. For example, Ms. Richmond described how student questions led to class discussions and experiments focused on hand washing:

So then eventually the questions turned to, “How does using soap kill it?” And that was great because they had had some chemistry, they had already had some life sciences, we had already talked about cells. And so I was able to talk about how soaps interact with membranes. . . . And then what I discovered is that they were taking it home and telling their parents, “This is why you need to wash your hands so often.”

Similarly, student questions led to class discussions about the merits of wearing masks to slow the spread of the virus:

The questions started talking about, “Why is it spreading and how do we stop it?” And that was way before the whole issue of the mask came in, but it was starting to. And we talked about how colds spread. We talked about other diseases, how it’s related to other diseases like the flu and other viral infections and, you know, how do they spread? Of course, at the time we didn’t know how bad it was going to get, but you know, they got a sense of like, “Well, there’s something we can do to reduce the ability to get infected.”

Eventually, Ms. Richmond’s school building closed due to the pandemic. She indicated that the transition from in-person to remote instruction caused significant disruptions to her instruction. Notably, she explained that she stopped addressing COVID, largely because students stopped asking questions:

Once the kids weren’t around, they weren’t asking questions. . . . And I kept asking them to send questions so that we could at least interact in a way with the questions and stuff. But I think the students got a little bit shy, because it was just so different to suddenly not be able to be in a conversation. I’m not really sure what happened there, but it was tough.