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Pre-Assessments
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Fossil Pre- Assessments
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What are
children's ideas about fossils?
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Most of your children will have seen fossils in museums, classrooms,
or on television, yet many will not have developed a formal scientific
conception of what a fossil is or how it forms. For example, some children
do not think of trace fossils or impressions as fossils. They are more
likely to equate fossils with bones (vertebrates) than with impressions
or spores (plants) or with burrows, tracks, molds, and casts of invertebrates.
Many children understand that fossils reveal evidence of earlier life
(children commonly refer to this as "prehistoric life") and
of extinct animals and plants, yet do not understand that fossils can
be studied to understand how life has changed through time. Children also
have a variety of nonscientific ideas about how fossils form. They generally
know that decay is involved, yet some children equate fossilization with
"hardening" of the organism, yet many do not understand how
deposition (burial) and sediment size affect fossilization.
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What do
children think about the age of fossils?
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The passage of time is a relative concept. For example, if you ask your
children to keep their eyes closed for one minute, many will open them
much earlier, and some much later. Adults, also, often have difficulty
estimating the passage of time. This difficulty is sharply magnified when
children, and adults, try to envision the vast scale of geologic time.
In addition, your children may have been seriously misled by fictional
movies and other media which distort life through time for entertainment.
For example, the spectacle of humans fighting off dinosaurs may have led
some children to think that dinosaurs and humans coexisted. In fact, nothing
could be further from the truth. Children may also have little idea of
how fossils provide evidence not only of past animal life (the fossil
record) but also of the age of rocks (geological record). It is very important
to use every opportunity to help children grasp the accepted scientific
explanations and concepts as accurately as possible. They need to achieve
this through an understanding of how scientists gather, analyze, interpret,
and reconstruct the past.
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Here are
some examples of what children think about fossils.
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- A fossil is an old object that was buried under the earth a long time
ago and rocks have formed around it, so it is preserved.
- A fossil can be a footprint that was preserved by rock forming around
it.
- Fossils are the remains or imprint of an object.
- Fossils might have formed in muddy places where an animal got trapped
in the mud and hardened.
- Fossils might be formed when oceans or lakes dry up and fish or shells
get left on or in the ground.
- When fossils start out to become fossils, they form mud around them
and it keeps building up and starts drying out to form rock.
- Fossils can show different extinct organisms.
- Fossils can tell us something about why they are gone [extinct].
- Fossils can tell us that Earth contained life long ago and that it
is very old.
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Here are
questions about fossils or changes in life through time that you can use
as pre-assessment questions with your children.
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- What is a fossil?
- What kinds of things can become fossils?
- How do you tell how old a fossil is?
- Where is the best place for a fossil to form?
- How long does it take for a fossil to form?
It is important that you find out what informal ideas your students already
have about fossils before you begin instruction. You can ask them to respond
to the questions above, either in writing or orally. Keep their responses
for later, so that you can compare what they think at the beginning of
your instruction on fossils to what they know at the end.
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