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When a lesson is labeled "New," it indicates that the lesson plans have passed a rigorous instructional materials evaluation that is closely associated with relevant educational research, including the publication Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005).

The evaluation is based on the premise that planning a lesson "backwards" produces better student understanding. This approach has three basic steps:

1. Identify desired results
2. Determine acceptable evidence
3. Plan learning activities and instruction

The report How People Learn, from the National Research Council, outlines implications for how we educate students and the design of curricula, instruction, assessments, and learning environments. Three findings were highlighted in guiding our instructional materials evaluation:

• Students come to new learning with preconceptions about how the world works. This initial understanding must be engaged in order to help students grasp new concept and information that they are expected to understand.
• To develop competence in an area of learning, students must have both a deep foundation of factual knowledge and a strong conceptual framework. This allows students to organize information into meaningful patterns that can be used for future problem-solving.
• To support student learning, students need to be able to think about their thinking so that they can recognize what they know and what they don't know. First, the learning goals must be clear to the student. Second, students must be taught how to prompt themselves and monitor their own understanding without teacher support.

The following elements have been added to the instructional materials to enhance their quality and provide teachers with a better foundation for presenting salinity studies to their students. Each of these elements retains the focus on identifying important content in order to help students answer the question; "Why am I doing this?"

May be a standard or benchmark; will be communicated to students and others as the unifying concept of a unit

Clarify specifically what students should understand about science concepts; may be a benchmark or grade-level expectation; students should be able to demonstrate that they understand in a relatively uncomplicated manner

Factual, procedural, and declarative knowledge needed to understand the key concepts and big idea; essential vocabulary

Engage students in the content; have no obvious right answer - open-ended and cause students to think; raise other important questions that are frequently interdisciplinary; often address conceptual foundations in science; naturally recur each time the concepts are taught

What the students have already presumed to have learned about the key concepts, knowledge, & skills; general background knowledge, interests, and experiences; specific background knowledge & vocabulary about the big idea and key concepts

From infancy to adulthood, learners seek out patterns and explanations for natural phenomena, forming explanations that seem logical, but are in fact not scientifically correct; instruction must directly challenge common preconceptions; idiosyncratic, or uncommon preconceptions will confound instruction that is not tied to frequent assessments of what students are thinking

Bransford, J., Brown A. & Cocking, R. (2000) How people learn, Washington D. C.: National Academy Press

Dean, C. & J. Bailey (2003). A report documenting the process for developing an integrated standards-based instructional unit. Aurora, CO: Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning.

Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. 2nd Ed. (2005) Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA:  Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development