To build new courses around COVID-19, Nandanee Sawh, vice principal of Marc Garneau Collegiate Institute in the York region east of Toronto, invited a former student of hers—now an emergency room doctor—to speak with the school's ninth-grade teachers. The doctor's experiences fighting the pandemic helped Sawh launch curriculum development work expected to begin in mid-May, aimed at integrating real-world phenomena with classroom teaching.

"The evaluation criteria lie in how to assess student learning so that it becomes authentic learning, thereby making students excited about learning as well," said Sawh, one of the school's three vice principals. "In this way, students are no longer containers passively receiving information, but rather they raise questions that guide the direction of instruction."

Bringing real-world phenomena—from the COVID-19 pandemic to community garbage collection—into science classrooms is an approach experts believe can better engage students. By doing so, teachers might also avoid the age-old question students repeatedly ask: why do we need to learn this lesson.

But such courses also offer unique opportunities to help science students develop critical thinking skills and learn to find reliable sources of information within the topics they study, including the current pandemic.

"We want students to be well-informed and able to make wise decisions," Sawh said. "If they don't know the answer, they know who to ask and where to look."

How to find real-world phenomena

The pandemic also prompted educators at Columbia Public Schools in Missouri, such as Mike Szydlowski, to partner with the University of Missouri–Columbia to adapt existing curricula, making the virus a focus of tenth-grade biology. After the district adopted COVID-19 curriculum materials co-developed with funding from the National Science Foundation, lessons originally about cells and cancer mutations changed.

"We did the same thing through the lens of the pandemic, with COVID-19 as part of it," said Szydlowski, the district's science coordinator. "The lessons involve a lot of research and simulations, considering how the pandemic spreads, and using a great deal of statistical and transmission analysis."

Columbia Public Schools' curriculum is based on place-based learning, where instruction revolves around a location, whether it's the school campus, community, city, or the world. Lessons are conducted not only through an environmental lens but also through economic and cultural perspectives.

Another recent project at Columbia Public Schools focused on the real-world issue of how quickly the local landfill was filling up. Students encouraged the district to launch a waste audit program and collected cafeteria and classroom trash at five schools. The result: they found that 80% of the waste in these buildings came from school lunches, much of it uneaten food.

"Except for restrooms, for sanitary reasons, every piece of trash was saved for a day and placed in a storage room," Szydlowski said. "Students and citizens together went through the garbage bags, determined what was truly waste and what could be reused, composted, or recycled, and wrote reports."

Jennifer Childress Self, senior researcher at WestEd and lead for science review at WestEd NextGenScience, said she sees growing use of real-world phenomena in science classrooms. Self works to support instructional materials aligned with this goal, including those developed by her organization and designed around the Next Generation Science Standards.

"However, because this differs from how most teachers learned, many districts and states still need to provide more professional development for teachers and administrators to help them understand the importance of this educational shift and how to implement it," she said via email.

Supporting teachers in shifting to real-world cases

This is exactly the core of the work of Xiufeng Liu. Liu serves as program director for Discovery Research K-12 in the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings at the National Science Foundation. Liu noted that the concept of scientific literacy has changed and agreed that educators need support to address this shift.

"In the past, scientific literacy was recalling factual information, such as Newton's laws or defining what energy is," he said. "Now, we define it as the ability to investigate real-world problems and understand what is happening in daily life."

Liu was involved in the same project that Szydlowski adopted for Columbia Public Schools. The instructional unit also involves the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, studying how COVID-19 spreads, defining what a virus is, and having students examine the social, political, and ethical issues surrounding decisions about mask-wearing and vaccination.

Gregg Solomon, who is in the same National Science Foundation division as Liu, added that it is crucial for teachers to feel supported when adopting new curricula.

"You see, teachers are told one year they should teach this way, and the next year they're told a completely different way," Solomon said. "If teachers are going to implement a new project, we want them to know they will have support."

For Lin Andrews, director of teacher support at the National Center for Science Education, which helps science teachers develop lessons around real-world phenomena, educators have a significant responsibility to explain science directly and in detail—but in a way that empowers rather than intimidates students. Therefore, whether the classroom is studying climate change or COVID-19, teachers should consider how to frame lessons in terms of solutions rather than just the problems themselves.

"You have to be factual while also helping these kids interpret the world," Andrews said. "They want to know, 'Should I be worried about the environment?' The answer is yes. But we also want to show them what we can do to fix it, and what they can do to help."

How real-world phenomena change students

Wendy Binder and Tricia Shelton also believe that introducing real-world phenomena can help students engage with science in a problem-solving way, just like scientists and engineers, and think about how to change the world. From focusing on local issues—such as the Brood X cicadas that hatched in the eastern United States this spring—to expanding studies on how water behaves in space, students learn to ask questions and think about solving problems rather than mechanically giving answers.

Binder is director of STEM professional learning programs at the National Science Teaching Association, where she developed lesson plans called "Daily Do" designed to immerse students in real-world phenomena, such as a recent lesson on "why water is spherical in space," which includes video clips of astronauts playing with water.

"Students discover that water molecules have an affinity for each other and form specific attractions," Binder said. "This is hard science, reinterpreted through a real-world phenomenon."

Other recent lessons include studying how helicopters fly on Mars and tracking the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Educators can access up to three resources per month for free from the website—or pay to become members for unlimited access. All of these weave real-world phenomena throughout the lessons.

"In the past, we used real-world phenomena as a starting point to spark student interest, whereas now, conversely, real-world phenomena are chosen very intentionally," said Shelton, chief learning officer at NSTA. "We hope children can feel in science that they can be not only knowers but also doers."