Five Innovations in Science Education

A socio-science issue is at the heart of every SEPUP unit. It anchors student learning and provides context for relevant and connected phenomena within the unit.

Instructional design explicitly includes strategies to facilitate sensemaking. These are both built into the daily instruction and, as seen here, listed independently so teachers may add these strategies elsewhere, as appropriate. 

SEPUP's Phenomena, Driving Questions, and Storyline documents outline the issue, relevant phenomena, driving and guiding questions, and storyline development. 

Students use a variety of activity types to address the unit issue and phenomena. All activities are inquiry-based, with varying levels of support and guidance. Students design solutions within the context of the unit's overarching socio-science issue.  

Summarized information about opportunities to design solutions can be found in applicable Unit Overviews. 

The SEPUP Assessment System, coupled with repeated practice with the three dimensions, guides teachers to use the SEPUP program such that students show significant improvement on applicable assessment variables from beginning of the year to end. 

The Teacher Edition contains specific suggestions for providing more or less support (for example see pp 179, 190-1). As a teacher plans the year, activities may be modified to appropriately scaffold throughout one year, or throughout a student's 6-8 career. 

Issues and Science was intentionally designed as 17 separate units to allow enough flexibility so that teachers may customize these intentional learning progressions. Explicit support is provided to identify students’ prior learning, accommodate for different entry points, and modify the amount of support. Here is one example for a series of units. 

In using multiple SEPUP units, students have repeated opportunities to build the knowledge and skills necessary to master the Engineering Design Performance Expectations. This Learning Pathway shows one possible sequence of five units addressing MS-ETS1-3 (be sure to zoom in!).