Chapter 3

Strategy Name:
Central Questions

Description:
A central question is a large often open ended one that you can put at the center of a unit to
guide the relevance of lessons. It should be a question that makes a real world connection. As
students progress through lessons, they should have an ever evolving understanding of the
question itself and a changing answer to it. Care must be taken to have the students come back
to the question as the unit progresses to assess their new understanding. An example would be
What would happen if the Earths gravity doubled?, which would lead to a long investigation
into its impact on biology, geography, and even other celestial bodies.
Application:
As science is often driven by inquiry and the desire to create explanations for phenomena,
central questions are fairly easy to use. A successful central question can serve to hold the
interest of students while you lay out what may seem disparate pieces of knowledge. Even
engineering concepts/skills like measuring can be united by a few central questions covering
the uses of measurement and the importance of comparative standards.