Implementing the Module

The lessons in this module are designed to be taught in sequence in middle school life science classes. This section offers general suggestions about using these materials in the classroom and information about the instructional model the module uses. You will find specific suggestions in the procedures provided for each lesson.

What Are the Goals of the Module?

The Science of Mental Illness is designed to help students reach these major goals associated with scientific literacy:

• to understand a set of basic principles related to the study of mental illness;
• to understand that the brain regulates changes in thinking, feelings, and behavior;
• to experience the process of scientific inquiry and the nature and methods of science; and
• to recognize the role of science in society and the relationship between basic science and public health.

What Are the Science Concepts and How Are They Connected?

The six lessons are designed to be taught in sequence so that students progress from an understanding of the basic functions of the brain (The Brain: Control Central) to more details about mental illnesses as diseases (What’s Wrong?) to an understanding of the factors that influence whether a person becomes mentally ill (Mental Illness: Could It Happen to Me?). Students then develop the understanding that mental illnesses, like other diseases, can be treated effectively so that individuals who are mentally ill can usually function well in their daily lives (Treatment Works!). Students then get a “real life” glimpse of how a person who has a mental illness is not so different from themselves and how the mental illness can disrupt many aspects of the person’s life (In Their Own Words). Finally, students will synthesize and communicate their new understanding about mental illness (You’re the Expert Now).

The chart Conceptual Flow of the Lessons displays the sequence of lessons and the major concepts that students will learn in each lesson.

How Does the Module Correlate with the National Science Education Standards?

The Science of Mental Illness supports teachers in their efforts to reform science education in the spirit of the National Research Council’s 1996 National Science Education Standards (NSES).³⁵

Content Standards

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 chart Content Standards: Grades 5–8 lists the specific content standards that this module addresses.

Teaching Standards

The suggested teaching strategies in the lessons support you as you work to meet the teaching standards outlined in the National Science Education Standards. The module helps teachers 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. 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 BSCS 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 the curiosity, openness to new ideas and data, and skepticism that characterize science.

Conceptual Flow of the Lessons

Lesson	Learning Focus*	Major Concepts
Lesson 1 The Brain: Control Central	Engage	The brain is the body organ that controls feelings, behaviors, and thoughts. Changes in the brain’s activity result in changes in each of these responses. These changes can be either short term or long term. A mental illness is a health condition that changes a person’s thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning.
Lesson 2 What’s Wrong?	Explore/Explain	Mental illnesses, including depression, are illnesses of the brain. Like illnesses that affect other parts of the body, mental illnesses are diagnosed by identifying characteristic symptoms.
Lesson 3 Mental Illness: Could It Happen to Me?	Explain	Everyone has some risk for becoming mentally ill. Factors such as genetics, environment, and social influences interact to increase or decrease a person’s risk for developing a mental illness.
Lesson 4 Treatment Works!	Elaborate	Most mental illnesses can be treated effectively. Treatments may include the use of medications and psychotherapies.
Lesson 5 In Their Own Words	Elaborate	Mental illnesses are diseases that affect many aspects of a person’s life but that can be treated effectively so that the individual can function effectively in everyday life.
Lesson 6 You’re the Expert Now	Evaluate	Learning the facts about mental illness can dispel misconceptions. The ability to evaluate scientific and health-related information is an important skill for students that they can apply throughout their lives.
*See How Does the BSCS 5E Instructional Model Promote Active, Collaborative, Inquiry-Based Learning?.

Content Standards: Grades 5–8

NSES Content Standard	Correlation to The Science of Mental Illness
Standard A: Science as Inquiry As a result of activities in grades 5–8, all students should develop
Abilities necessary to do scientific inquiry
Identify questions that can be answered through scientific investigations.	Lessons 2, 3, 4
Develop descriptions, explanations, predictions, and models using evidence.	Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4
Think critically and logically to make the relationships between evidence and explanations.	Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4, 6
Recognize and analyze alternative explanations and predictions.	Lessons 1, 2, 3, 6
Communicate scientific procedures and explanations.	Lessons 2, 3, 4, 6
Understandings about scientific inquiry
Different kinds of questions suggest different kinds of scientific investigations. Some investigations involve observing and describing objects, organisms, or events; some involve collecting specimens; some involve experiments; some involve seeking more information; some involve discovery of new objects and phenomena; and some involve making models.	Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4
Technology used to gather data enhances accuracy and allows scientists to analyze and quantify results of investigations.	Lessons 1, 2, 4
Science advances through legitimate skepticism. Asking questions and querying other scientists’ explanations is part of scientific inquiry. Scientists evaluate the explanations proposed by other scientists by examining evidence, comparing evidence, identifying faulty reasoning, pointing out statements that go beyond the evidence, and suggesting alternative explanations for the same observations.	Lesson 6
Standard C: Life Science As a result of their activities in grades 5–8, all students should develop understanding of
Structure and function in living systems
Living systems at all levels of organization demonstrate the complementary nature of structure and function. Important levels of organization for structure and function include cells, organs, tissues, organ systems, whole organisms, and ecosystems.	Lessons 1, 2
Standard F: Science in Personal and Social Perspectives As a result of activities in grades 5–8, all students should develop understanding of
Risks and benefits
Important personal and social decisions are made based on perceptions of benefits and risks.	Lessons 2, 3, 4, 5

National Health Education Standards: Grades 5–8

Health Standard	Correlation to The Science of Mental Illness
Standard 1: Students will comprehend concepts related to health promotion and disease prevention.	Lessons 1, 2, 3, 4, 6
Standard 3: Students will demonstrate the ability to practice health-enhancing behaviors and reduce health risks.	Lessons 3, 4, 6
Standard 5: Students will demonstrate the ability to use interpersonal communication skills to enhance health.	Lesson 6
Standard 7: Students will demonstrate the ability to advocate for personal, family, and community health.	Lesson 6

Assessment Standards

You can engage in ongoing assessment of your 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 encounter in their lives outside the classroom or in which scientists participate. Annotations guide teachers to these opportunities for assessment and provide answers to questions that can help teachers analyze student feedback.

How Does the Module Correlate with the National Health Education Standards?

Although this module is intended primarily for use in life science classes, it can also be used in health classes. Some schools may wish to have the science and health teachers collaborate to teach this module. Because of this applicability to health classes, the lessons are also correlated with the National Health Education Standards.¹⁵ The standards listed in the table National Health Education Standards: Grades 5–8 link most directly to the lessons in this module.

How Does the BSCS 5E Instructional Model Promote Active, Collaborative, Inquiry-Based Learning?

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 understandings. 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 they do when they work alone in a competitive environment. When 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 experiences include both those that involve students in direct experimentation and those in which students develop explanations through critical and logical thinking.

This view of students as 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

• express their current thinking;
• interact with objects, organisms, substances, and equipment to develop a range of experiences on which to base their thinking;
• reflect on their thinking by writing and expressing themselves and comparing what they think with what others think; and
• make connections between their learning experiences and the real world.

This module provides a built-in structure for creating a constructivist classroom: the BSCS 5E Instructional Model. This model sequences the learning experiences so that students construct their understanding of a concept over time. The model takes 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 summarize the goals for each E.

Engage

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 think they know about the topic and concepts to be developed. It also gives each learner the opportunity to consider what his or her current ideas and thoughts about the topic are. The Engage phase should also capture students’ interest and make them curious about the topic and concepts.

The Engage lesson in this module, Lesson 1, The Brain: Control Central, is designed to

• pique students’ curiosity and generate interest in learning about mental illnesses and
• provide an opportunity for students and teachers to assess what each student currently thinks about mental illnesses.

Explore

In the Explore phase of the module, students have experiences with objects, events, data, and ideas that relate directly to the concept to be developed. Students use the common experiences with phenomena and ideas as a foundation for thinking about the topic.

During the Explore phase of Lesson 2, What’s Wrong?, and Lesson 3, Mental Illness: Could It Happen to Me?, students

• use their skills of observation, problem solving, and critical thinking to deduce that mental illnesses are similar to other types of illnesses and
• gain experience with factors that influence whether a person is at a greater or lesser risk for getting a mental illness.

Explain

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. During this phase, students are encouraged to explain concepts and ideas in their own words and to compare their thinking with that of their classmates. 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.

Parts of Lesson 2, What’s Wrong?, and Lesson 3, Mental Illness: Could It Happen to Me?, serve as the Explain phase of the module. In these lessons, students

• use their experiences in the Explore phase to create and apply a formal definition of the word illness to mental illness and
• develop an understanding of the distinction between the risk for getting a mental illness and actually getting a mental illness.

Elaborate

In the Elaborate phase, students apply or extend the concepts in new situations and relate their previous experiences to new ones.

The Elaborate lessons in this module, Lesson 4, Treatment Works!, and Lesson 5, In Their Own Words, build on students’ new understanding that mental illnesses are similar to other diseases that affect the body. Students

• examine evidence that mental illnesses are treatable, similar to other diseases, and
• reinforce the ideas learned in previous lessons and see their application to real life by viewing videos of people who have experienced a mental illness.

Evaluate

The Evaluate lesson is the final stage of the Instructional Model, but it provides only 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 model. 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. Equally important, the Evaluate lesson provides students with an opportunity to check and assess how what they are learning “fits” with their prior understanding. Research on learning is now informing us that this continued self-assessment that a learner does is important for gaining a deeper, lasting understanding of content.¹⁰

The Evaluate lesson in this module, Lesson 6, You’re the Expert Now, gives students the opportunity to

• demonstrate what they believe are the main ideas that other people should know about mental illness,
• evaluate materials about mental illness for accuracy, and
• consider how their own understanding of mental illness has changed since beginning this module.

When a teacher uses the BSCS 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.

What the Teacher Does

Stage	That is consistent with the BSCS 5E Instructional Model	That is inconsistent with the BSCS 5E Instructional Model
Engage	Piques students’ curiosity and generates interest Determines students’ current understanding (prior knowledge) of a concept or idea Invites students to express what they think Invites students to raise their own questions	Introduces vocabulary Explains concepts Provides definitions and answers Provides closure Discourages students’ ideas and questions
Explore	Encourages student-to-student interaction Observes and listens to the students as they interact Asks probing questions to help students make sense of their experiences Provides time for students to puzzle through problems	Provides answers Proceeds too rapidly for students to make sense of their experiences Provides closure Tells students that they are wrong Gives information and facts that solve the problem Leads students step-by-step to a solution
Explain	Encourages students to use their common experiences and data from the Engage and Explore lessons to develop explanations Asks questions that help students express understanding and explanations Requests justification (evidence) for students’ explanations Provides time for students to compare their ideas with those of others and perhaps to revise their thinking Introduces terminology and alternative explanations after students express their ideas	Neglects to solicit students’ explanations Ignores data and information students gathered from previous lessons Dismisses students’ ideas Accepts explanations that are not supported by evidence Introduces unrelated concepts or skills
Elaborate	Focuses students’ attention on conceptual connections between new and former experiences Encourages students to use what they have learned to explain a new event or idea Reinforces students’ use of scientific terms and descriptions previously introduced Asks questions that help students draw reasonable conclusions from evidence and data	Neglects to help students connect new and former experiences Provides definitive answers Tells students that they are wrong Leads students step-by-step to a solution
Evaluate	Observes and records as students demonstrate their understanding of concepts and performance of skills Provides time for students to compare their ideas with those of others and perhaps to revise their thinking Interviews students to assess their developing understanding Encourages students to assess their own progress	Tests vocabulary words, terms, and isolated facts Introduces new ideas or concepts Creates ambiguity Promotes open-ended discussion unrelated to the concept or skill

What the Students Do

Stage	That is consistent with the BSCS 5E Instructional Model	That is inconsistent with the BSCS 5E Instructional Model
Engage	Become interested in and curious about the concept or topic Express current understanding of a concept or idea Raise questions such as, What do I already know about this? What do I want to know about this? How could I find out?	Ask for the “right” answer Offer the “right” answer Insist on answers or explanations Seek closure
Explore	“Mess around” with materials and ideas Conduct investigations in which they observe, describe, and record data Try different ways to solve a problem or answer a question Acquire a common set of experiences so they can compare results and ideas Compare their ideas with those of others	Let others do the thinking and exploring (passive involvement) Work quietly with little or no interaction with others (only appropriate when exploring ideas or feelings) Stop with one solution Demand or seek closure
Explain	Explain concepts and ideas in their own words Base their explanations on evidence acquired during previous investigations Record their ideas and current understanding Reflect on and perhaps revise their ideas Express their ideas using appropriate scientific language Compare their ideas with what scientists know and understand	Propose explanations from “thin air” with no relationship to previous experiences Bring up irrelevant experiences and examples Accept explanations without justification Ignore or dismiss other plausible explanations Propose explanations without evidence to support their ideas
Elaborate	Make conceptual connections between new and former experiences Use what they have learned to explain a new object, event, organism, or idea Use scientific terms and descriptions Draw reasonable conclusions from evidence and data Communicate their understanding to others	Ignore previous information or evidence Draw conclusions from “thin air” Use terminology inappropriately and without understanding
Evaluate	Demonstrate what they understand about the concept(s) and how well they can implement a skill Compare their current thinking with that of others and perhaps revise their ideas Assess their own progress by comparing their current understanding with their prior knowledge Ask new questions that take them deeper into a concept or topic area	Disregard evidence or previously accepted explanations in drawing conclusions Offer only yes-or-no answers or memorized definitions or explanations as answers Fail to express satisfactory explanations in their own words Introduce new, irrelevant topics

How Does the Module Support Ongoing Assessment?

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 six lessons, rather than something that happens more formally just once at the end of the module. Accordingly, integrated within the module’s lessons are specific assessment components. These embedded assessment opportunities include one or more of the following strategies:

• performance-based activities (for example, working collaboratively to develop informational brochures or participating in a discussion of health effects);
• oral presentations to the class (for example, presenting results of scientific modeling activity or participating in a class discussion); and
• written assignments (for example, answering questions or summarizing the major ideas conveyed by a lesson or activity).

These strategies allow the teacher to assess a variety of aspects of the learning process, such as students’ prior knowledge, development of skills related to problem solving and critical thinking, level of understanding of new information, communication skills, and ability to synthesize ideas and apply understanding to a new situation.

An assesment icon and an annotation that describes the aspect of learning being assessed appear in the margin beside each step in which embedded assessment occurs.

How Can Controversial Topics Be Handled in the Classroom?

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, technology, 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 the light of values and ethics. As students encounter issues about which they feel strongly, some discussions might become controversial. How much controversy develops 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.

• Remain neutral. Neutrality may be the single most important characteristic of a successful discussion facilitator.
• Encourage students to discover as much information about the issue as possible.
• Keep the discussion relevant and moving forward by questioning or posing appropriate problems or hypothetical situations. Encourage everyone to contribute, but do not force reluctant students into the discussion.
• Emphasize that everyone must be open to hearing and considering diverse views.
• Use unbiased questioning to help the students critically examine all views presented.
• Allow for the discussion of all feelings and opinions.
• Avoid seeking consensus on all issues. The multifaceted issues that the students discuss result in the presentation of divergent views, and students should learn that this is acceptable.
• Acknowledge all contributions in the same evenhanded manner. If a student seems to be saying something for its shock value, see whether other students recognize the inappropriate comment and invite them to respond.
• Create a sense of freedom in the classroom. Remind students, however, that freedom implies the responsibility to exercise that freedom in ways that generate positive results for all.
• Insist upon a nonhostile environment in the classroom. Remind students to respond to ideas instead of to the individuals presenting those ideas.
• Respect silence. Reflective discussions are often slow. If a teacher breaks the silence, students may allow the teacher to dominate the discussion.
• At the end of the discussion, ask the students to summarize the points that they and their classmates have made. Respect students regardless of their opinion about any controversial issue.

 

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