Scrolling through China

I implemented a social studies unit that integrated a design challenge with a group of third graders in an urban elementary school in the northeast. I have a well-mannered, hardworking class that comes to school everyday eager to learn. There are 24 students in, 14 girls and 10 boys. The students are heterogeneously grouped and the majority of them are functioning on or slightly below grade level. Seventeen of my students, 73.9% are Asian, four, 17.4% are Hispanic, one student is Pakistani, one student is Turkish, and one student is African American. The social studies curriculum for third grade is “Communities Around the World.” In general, many of my past third grade students have found social studies to be quite boring, and I wanted to come up with a way to make it more engaging for my current 24 students. I decided to implement a unit on China. The overall goal that I had for my students was for them to realize that the people of China celebrate many customs, beliefs, and traditions. One of these is the painting of hanging scrolls and handscrolls made of silk or paper. The people are also responsible for many inventions and discoveries that are used throughout the world. As a culminating activity, the students completed a design challenge. The students designed and created a Chinese hanging scroll that told a story. The story was expressed in the form of a poem and explained something they had learned about China. Students worked in groups of four. Each group member had a specific job to do, and when the project was completed, each group had a finished hanging scroll that met the design specifications. The students had to research the technique of scroll painting on the Internet or in various trade books found in the classroom before they could begin their scrolls. They could also use these resources to get ideas for their design. Their completed design had to look like a Chinese hanging scroll, and each student in the group had to contribute to the design. Research was conducted on student learning through teacher journaling, pre and post attitude and content surveys, minute papers, and the design challenge and portfolio assessed by a rubric. One of the questions on the attitude survey about working in cooperative groups asked students, “Which do you like better, working in groups, partnerships, or by yourself?” By the end of the unit, the percentage of students who preferred to work in groups increased from 59% to 70%, while the percentage who preferred working in partnerships decreased from 27% to 17%. The number of those who liked working by themselves remained the same. The post assessment results of the social studies attitude survey and the China content survey did not yield any significant differences when compared to the results of the pre-assessments. This surprised me since the hanging scrolls each group designed were a representation of the knowledge the students had learned throughout the course of this unit. I wondered how many of my students related the design challenge to social studies, and how many did not see any relationship at all. Overall I would rate the implementation of this unit a success, especially the design challenge. It allowed my students to have control over their own learning experience.