At the end of a long day at our Modeling the Molecular World course in Milwaukee this summer, Laurel Kulig, a high school teacher at Northtown Academy in Chicago, asked her table the question every teacher eventually asks about modeling: "How can you assess this?" Leah Inman, sitting with her, had part of the answer. With a model, "you can move things around," Leah said, "and even if you don't remember the vocab, you're like, yeah, this thing can attach to that thing." That lets a teacher see whether students "have an issue with vocabulary or understanding," and then "you know what to address." The model separates the word from the idea.
How can you use models to see what students are thinking? In the Explain phase of WE² Model, students use the model to show what they think is happening. Because the model carries part of the explanation, you can see what students understand, what they can name, and what to teach next.
Leah and Laurel's table landed on a practical tool: a rubric with separate levels. "Are they
understanding the concepts? Are they applying the vocabulary?" A student who says "this thing can attach to that thing" may understand binding before they can name it. Scoring the two separately lets you credit the understanding and still teach the word, the way the vocabulary arrived just in time in our Explore post.
Laurel also pointed to something that happened all day without anyone planning it:
Research on 3D molecular models supports the talk. Lisa Couper and colleagues (2016) studied 492 high school biology students using magnetized 3D virus models. In small groups, students assembled the models, took them apart, and shook them at different speeds while answering questions about what the model's features represented. Then they discussed those questions as a class. Average scores rose from 26.7% on the pretest to 43.7% on the posttest. Students gained more when their teacher spent more time actively engaged with students, when they spent more time handling the models, and when the class spent more time in discussion.
Neither study had a comparison group, and those classroom factors explained only part of the differences in learning. The pattern still matters for Explain. Students learn more when they use the model and talk about it, with a teacher close by.
Grace Sundeen, a high school biology teacher in Milwaukee Public Schools, has students draw schematically from the physical model and annotate what's happening. That turns "something 3D that we can manipulate to something flat like they see on a test."
Leah uses the free Stop Motion Studio app. Students film their models in motion and submit a draft. She critiques it, and they fix it. It helps when she can't get around to every group, or when groups work on different days. Karen Avery, another teacher who uses stop motion, values it for a different reason: it slows everyone down, so she has time to interact with every group.
Monica Olague, who teaches at Mount Mary University, puts the models out during exams and gives students "the freedom to get up and go and look." "Many students still don't have that habit," she said.
Crystal McDowell, of Greenbrier High School in Evans, Georgia, suggested a way to build the habit: modeling lab practicals, like the stations in an anatomy course. "Then they have to go and use it versus you have the option to use it." The model becomes part of the assessment instead of an extra on the side table.
Early in our discussion, one teacher described Explain as "back and forth between explaining and exploring," especially with the Enzymes in Action Kit©. "You look at it, you have an explanation, and you go back." Explain sends students back into the cycle with better questions.
This week, ask students to explain one idea with the model before they write about it, and adapt the task for your students. What do your students' models show you that a written test misses? Reply and tell us.
→Next in the series: our final post, on where WE² Model goes next