National Institutes of Health
National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
Main Getting Started Teacher's Guide Student Activities About NIH and NIDDK
The five lessons in this module are designed to be taught in sequence for approximately eight days as a replacement for a part of the standard curriculum in middle school life science. The following pages offer general suggestions about using these materials in the classroom; you will find specific suggestions in the procedures provided for each lesson.
The Science of Energy Balance: Calorie Intake and Physical Activity is designed to help students reach these major goals associated with scientific literacy:
The lessons are organized into a conceptual framework that allows students to move from what they already know about energy balance, some of which may be incorrect, to gaining a scientific perspective on the nature of energy balance and its importance to science and to their lives. Students begin by developing their own definition of energy balance through investigations of their own energy use (Burning It Up) and energy intake (A Serving by Any Other Name). Students then explore energy balance by acting as energy balance experts to evaluate five fictitious characters (A Delicate Balance). An investigation of factors affecting energy balance using an animal model (Munching Mice) allows students to gain a deeper understanding of energy balance and its impact on our lives. The final lesson, Dear Me, allows students to consider what they have learned in the context of how they envision themselves in the future. The following two tables illustrate the science content and conceptual flow of the classroom lessons and activities.
Lesson | Science Content |
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Lesson 1 | What is energy?; physical activity (Energyout) |
Lesson 2 | Food as a source of energy (Energyin) |
Lesson 3 | The energy balance equation |
Lesson 4 | Factors affecting energy balance |
Lesson 5 | Strategies for achieving energy balance |
Lesson | Learning Focus* | Major Concepts |
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Lesson 1 |
Engage |
Humans require energy to function. The total energy used by an individual depends on the type and intensity of the activity and the energy required for basic life processes. The amount of energy required to maintain minimum essential life functions is called basal metabolic rate, or BMR. The amount of energy used by an individual varies from day to day and from one individual to another. |
Lesson 2 A Serving by Any Other Name |
Explore Explain |
Humans obtain energy from the food they consume. Food labels contain information about the types of nutrients, number of calories per serving, and serving size. |
Lesson 3 A Delicate Balance |
Explore Explain |
Maintaining a particular weight requires consuming the same number of calories in food that are used in BMR and physical activities—that is, balancing energy intake and energy output. The balance over a long period of time, such as weeks and months, will affect weight gain and loss. Children, adolescents, and teenagers need to consume more calories than they use for BMR and physical activities because of the energy requirements for growth. |
Lesson 4 Munching Mice |
Explore Explain Elaborate |
Energy balance can be affected by several variables, including genetics, food availability, and physical activity. Laboratory animals can be used as experimental models for humans. Graphing data on weight change helps researchers draw conclusions about the impact of factors on energy balance. |
Lesson 5 Dear Me |
Evaluate | Strategies can be developed for maintaining a healthy body weight. Choice is an important variable. Energy balance is a lifelong issue. |
*See How Does the 5E Instructional Model Promote Active, Collaborative, Inquiry-Based Learning? |
The Science of Energy Balance: Calorie Intake and Physical Activity supports teachers in their efforts to reform science education in the spirit of the National Research Council’s 1996 National Science Education Standards (NSES). The content of the module is explicitly standards based. Each time a standard is addressed in a lesson, an icon appears in the margin and the applicable standard is identified. The following chart lists the specific content standards that this module addresses.
Standard A: As a result of activities in grades 5–8, all students should develop | Correlation to The Science of Energy Balance: Calorie Intake and Physical Activity |
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Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry | |
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Lessons 1, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 3, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 3, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 3, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4 |
Understandings about scientific inquiry | |
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Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 3, 4 |
Standard B: As a result of their Activities in grades 5–8, all students should develop understanding of | |
Transfer of energy | |
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Lessons 1, 2, 3 |
Standard C: As a result of their activities in grades 5–8, all students should develop an understanding of | |
Structure and function in living systems | |
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Lessons 2, 3 |
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Lesson 5 |
Reproduction and Heredity | |
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Lessons 1, 3, 4, 5 |
Regulation and behavior | |
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Lessons 3, 4, 5 |
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Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
Standard F: As a result of their activities in grades 5–8, all students should develop an understanding of | |
Personal health | |
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Lessons 1, 3, 4, 5 |
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Lessons 2, 3, 4, 5 |
Risks and benefits | |
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Lesson 5 |
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Lesson 5 |
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Lesson 5 |
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Lesson 5 |
Standard G: As a result of activities in grades 5–8, all students should develop an understanding of | |
Science as a human endeavor | |
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Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4 |
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Lessons 1, 3, 4 |
Nature of science | |
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Lessons 1, 4 |
The suggested teaching strategies in all the lessons support teachers as they work to meet the teaching standards outlined in the National Science Education Standards. This module helps teachers of science plan an inquiry-based science program by providing short-term objectives for students. It also includes planning tools such as the Conceptual Flow of the Lessons chart and the Suggested Timeline for teaching the module. Teachers can use this module to update their curriculum in response to their students’ interest in this topic. The focus on active, collaborative, and inquiry-based learning in the lessons helps teachers support the development of student understanding and nurture a community of science learners.
The structure of the lessons in this module enables teachers to guide and facilitate learning. All the activities encourage and support student inquiry, promote discourse among students, and challenge students to accept and share responsibility for their learning. Using the 5E Instructional Model, combined with active, collaborative learning, allows teachers to respond effectively to the diversity of student backgrounds and learning styles. The module is fully annotated, with suggestions for how teachers can encourage and model the skills of scientific inquiry, as well as foster the curiosity, skepticism, and openness to new ideas and data that characterize successful study of science.
Teachers can engage in ongoing assessment of their teaching and of student learning using the variety of assessment components embedded within the module’s structure. The assessment tasks are authentic; they are similar in form to tasks that students will engage in outside the classroom or to practices in which scientists participate. Annotations guide teachers to these opportunities for assessment and provide answers to questions that can help teachers analyze student feedback.
Because learning does not occur through a process of passive absorption, the lessons in this module promote active learning. Students are involved in more than listening and reading. They are developing skills, analyzing and evaluating evidence, experiencing and discussing, and talking to their peers about their own understanding. Students work collaboratively with others to solve problems and plan investigations. Many students find that they learn better when they work with others in a collaborative environment than when they work alone in a competitive environment. When all this active, collaborative learning is directed toward inquiry science, students succeed in making their own discoveries. They ask questions, observe, analyze, explain, draw conclusions, and ask new questions. These inquiry-based experiences include both those that involve students in direct experimentation and those in which students develop explanations through critical and logical thinking.
This viewpoint that students are active thinkers who construct their own understanding out of interactions with phenomena, the environment, and other individuals is based on the theory of constructivism. A constructivist view of learning recognizes that students need time to
This module provides a built-in structure for creating a constructivist classroom: the 5E Instructional Model. This model sequences the learning experiences so that students have the opportunity to construct their understanding of a concept over time. The model leads students through five phases of learning that are easily described using five words that begin with the letter E: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate. The following paragraphs illustrate how the five Es are implemented across the lessons in this module.
Students come to learning situations with prior knowledge. This knowledge may or may not be congruent with the concepts presented in this module. The Engage lesson provides the opportunity for teachers to find out what students already know or what they think they know about the topic and concepts to be developed.
The Engage phase of this module, found in Lesson 1: Burning It Up, is designed to
In the Explore phase of the module, Lesson 1: Burning It Up, Lesson 2: A Serving by Any Other Name, and Lesson 3: A Delicate Balance, students investigate energy balance by considering foods as the source of energy in and physical activity as energy out. These lessons require students to make observations, evaluate and interpret data, and draw conclusions. Students
The Explain phase provides opportunities for students to connect their previous experiences and to begin to make conceptual sense of the main ideas of the module. This stage also allows for the introduction of formal language, scientific terms, and content information that might make students’ previous experiences easier to describe and explain.
In the Explain lessons in this module, Lesson 1: Burning It Up, Lesson 2: A Serving by Any Other Name, and Lesson 3: A Delicate Balance, students
In Elaborate lessons, students apply or extend the concepts in new situations and relate their previous experiences to new ones. In the Elaborate lesson in this module, Lesson 4: Munching Mice, students make conceptual connections between new and former experiences. They draw upon their knowledge about energy balance to investigate factors that affect energy balance in an animal model. In this lesson, students
The Evaluate lesson is the final stage of the instructional model, but it only provides a “snapshot” of what the students understand and how far they have come from where they began. In reality, the evaluation of students’ conceptual understanding and ability to use skills begins with the Engage lesson and continues throughout each stage of the instructional model, as described in the following section. Combined with the students’ written work and performance of tasks throughout the module, however, the Evaluate lesson can serve as a summative assessment of what students know and can do.
The Evaluate lesson in this module, Lesson 5: Dear Me, provides an opportunity for students to
To review the relationship of the 5E Instructional Model to the concepts presented in the module, see the chart Conceptual Flow of the Lessons.
When a teacher uses the 5E Instructional Model, he or she engages in practices that are very different from those of a traditional teacher. In response, students also participate in their learning in ways that are different from those seen in a traditional classroom. The following charts, What the Teacher Does and What the Students Do, outline these differences.
Stage | That is consistent with the 5E Instructional Model | That is inconsistent with the 5E Instructional Model |
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Engage |
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Explore |
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Explain |
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Elaborate |
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Evaluate |
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Stage | That is consistent with the 5E Instructional Model | That is inconsistent with the 5E Instructional Model |
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Engage |
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Explore |
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Explain |
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Elaborate |
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Evaluate |
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Because teachers will use this module in a variety of ways and at a variety of points in their curriculum, the most appropriate mechanism for assessing student learning is one that occurs informally at various points within the five lessons, rather than just once, formally, at the end of the module. Accordingly, integrated within the lessons are specific assessment components. These “embedded” assessment opportunities include one or more of the following strategies:
These strategies allow the teacher to assess a variety of aspects of the learning process, such as students’ prior knowledge and current understanding, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, level of understanding of new information, communication skills, and ability to synthesize ideas and apply understanding to a new situation.
An assessment icon and an annotation that describes the aspect of learning that teachers can assess appear in the margin beside each step in which embedded assessment occurs.
Teachers sometimes feel that the discussion of values is inappropriate in the science classroom or that it detracts from the learning of “real” science. The lessons in this module, however, are based on the conviction that there is much to be gained by involving students in analyzing issues of science, energy balance, and society. Society expects all citizens to participate in the democratic process, and our educational system must provide opportunities for students to learn to deal with contentious issues with civility, objectivity, and fairness. Likewise, students need to learn that science intersects with life in many ways.
In this module, students have a variety of opportunities to discuss, interpret, and evaluate basic science and health issues, some in light of their values and ethics. As students encounter issues about which they feel strongly, some discussions might become controversial. The degree of controversy will depend on many factors, such as how similar the students are with respect to socioeconomic status, perspectives, value systems, and religious preferences. In addition, the language and attitude of the teacher factor into the flow of ideas and the quality of exchange among the students.
The following guidelines may help teachers facilitate discussions that balance factual information with feelings.
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