Students will be given a reading list and a time-line to complete their reading. The students will receive explicit instruction on how to outline their reading and record important points. In order to support student learning, students will be given direct instruction on this material in the form of lectures, question and answer sessions, a variety of hands on activities intended to reinforce concepts such as measuring and graphing radioactive decay rates of a fictional element and will be given in class and homework assignments intended to develop problem solving skills related Nuclear Chemistry. These activities serve as a mechanism to monitor student understanding.
Assessments will be frequent during this period of instruction. Students will benefit from immediate feedback on their daily performance. Electronic response pads allow for immediate feedback and facilitate pacing and movement through what can be considered dense material. In the absence of response pads, students can be given frequent quizzes of which not all are collected and graded by the teacher. These quizzes can be self-assessed in the moments immediately following administration. While some quizzes can be assessed in this manner, others must be collected and graded by the teacher as well. In either case (electronic response pad or varying student/teacher graded quizzes), the goal is to create and maintain tension in and out of the classroom while generating a sense of excitement and engagement with the material. Struggling students will be identified early and often and should be provided extra support from a variety of sources (the instructor, paraprofessionals, resource teachers, after school office hours and peer tutoring programs).
Personal responsibility and independent engagement with the material will be supported by such mechanisms as open note quizzes. For the examination at the end of the first half of this unit, students will not have access to any supportive material or aids. Students will be given access to practice tests during the final preparation period before administration of the final examination on this material for purposes of self-assessment.
By the end of the first half of this unit, students will be able to:
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1.
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Explain how repulsion forces (proton-proton) are overcome in the nucleus
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2.
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Relate the energy liberated during a nuclear process to its change in mass (E=mc
2
)
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3.
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Illustrate how unstable parent isotopes decay to more stable daughter isotopes
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4.
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Distinguish between the three most common forms of radioactive decay (alpha, beta and gamma) and recognize how the nucleus of the atom changes as a result
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5.
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Explain the different kinds of damage in matter that results from exposure to each kind of radiation (and the relative penetrations)
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6.
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Calculate the amount of radioactive substance remaining after a given number of half-lives has transpired
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