Learning Target: I can self assess my best drawing. Learning Evidence and Assessment: Students will submit their best drawing and write a short reflection about why they picked this drawing. Teacher will assess based on the rubric.
Academic Language: rubric, self-assess
Lesson Opening: Watch this youtube video on scientific illustrating. Talk about how this artist uses strategies we have learned. What are some new things we learned from her?
Learning Steps:
Students should look back at their drawings from the class. The goal of this activity is for students to celebrate how much improvement they have made! Students will choose their best drawing and make a new, final version of it. Then, students fill out the sketching rubric.
Finally, they will write a short reflection, using the following sentence stems.
I improved… I chose this drawing because… One detail I highlighted was… I drew these two versions because…
Teachers will collect student work and use the rubric to assess.
Lesson Conclusion: Invite students to share drawings with class. You could extend by giving them a loose piece of paper and hanging them up around the room or in the hallway.
Research Connection: When students begin to think of drawing as a learning process rather than a final product, they are more likely to put in the effort to improve both their drawings and the understandings represented therein (Glynn & Muth, 2008). Drawings often begin as a simplistic rendering of an object or a concept, but with continued instruction, student drawings become more sophisticated as they learn more about the subject at hand. Students make their thinking visible to themselves while teachers can use the spectrum of drawings for assessment (Fello et al., 2017). Misconceptions in student prior knowledge stand in the way of accurately learning new content because learners hold on to inaccurate mental models even when they conflict with scientific models, particularly when teachers teach science as a series of facts (Edens & Potter, 2003). Edens & Potter (2003) found that misconceptions were more likely to be corrected when students drew about a new concept instead of writing about it.