ABSTRACT
It was March and the students in Mrs. W’s third grade classroom were in their 7th day of a six-week plant growth experiment. The experiment was organized around the question: What conditions support plant growth? In the months leading up to the experiment, students had been trying to understand why different plants grew in different places in a backyard area behind their school. As they began to consider the effects of sun, their classroom teacher supported them in conducting an investigation in which they used the Wisconsin Fast Plant™ to understand the effect of light on plant growth. In their experiment, students compared plants grown in three conditions: sun, in which plants received continuous light; shade, in which they were placed in a lightbox with the light off; and sun & shade, in which plants received eight hours of light per day from the lightbox. The plants grown in the shade initially grew tallest as they put their resources into reaching the light. Thus, on Day 7, many students judged these plants to be most successful, often making connections to their understanding that Wisconsin was a colder place than their southeastern state and reasoning that the plants were used to living in cold and shady places.
