Authentic Performance Activities facilitate a student's understanding of a lesson's usefulness in real life. They are also an Understanding by Design (UbD) assessment tool. Focus questions act as pre- and post-assessment indicators of the activity's effectiveness.
Focus Questions:
1. Why do we sometimes study things in nature when inventing things to solve problems for humans like snowshoes and camouflage?
2. Can you think of any other helpful inventions that may have mimicked natural structures?
3. What inventions may have come from studying seed dispersal?
Authentic Performance
You are an engineer and your boss has asked you to give a presentation about products developed from functional structures in nature. You decide to look at seed dispersal. Think about how milkweed and dandelion seeds blow in the wind, how maple seeds spin away as they fall and how burrs stick to your clothes (and animals) when they are touched. Which human inventions have mimicked these useful adaptive structures?
When you research information you must cite the reference. Citing for websites is different from citing from books, magazines and periodicals. The style of citing shown here is from the MLA Style Citations (Modern Language Association).
When citing a WEBSITE the general format is as follows.
Author Last Name, First Name(s). "Title: Subtitle of Part of Web Page, if appropriate." Title: Subtitle: Section of Page if appropriate. Sponsoring/Publishing Agency, If Given. Additional significant descriptive information. Date of Electronic Publication or other Date, such as Last Updated. Day Month Year of access < URL >.
Amsel, Sheri. "Seed Dispersal Adaptation - Authentic Performance" Exploring Nature Educational Resource ©2005-2024. March 25, 2024
< http://exploringnature.org/db/view/1253 >
