9450235 Becker The Southwest Regional Laboratory(SWRL) proposes to develop, produce, field-test, refine, evaluate, and disseminate a series of eight instructional modules for secondary school physical science or general science. Each module builds upon a video-taped portrayal of a selected episode in the history of science which is rich in conceptual challenge, conflicting points of view and cultural context. The units will include statics, kinematics, dynamics, electricity and magnetism, heat, light, the structure of matter, and modern problems in physical science. Some of the portrayals will include building the Brooklyn Bridge, Galileo's observations of falling bodies, Emilie du Chatelet and Voltaire's studies of collisions, Count Rumford's experiments with heat, Newton's optics, Marie and Pierre Curie's experiments with radiation. Issues of stability and change, scale and structure, and systems and interactions will be central to the development of the materials for each unit. The materials should motivate students who have shown little interest in science, challenge their conceptions of the structure and workings of the physical world and build greater understanding of the process and culture of scientific activity. The videos are supplemented with student reading selections with both excerpts from original documents and modern interpretive text. Protocols for group and individual projects including cooperative learning activities, student presentations and laboratory investigations and teacher guides for class discussion and debate are also provided. The videos are produced by KCET; Evaluation is carried out at SWRL ***
