Ideal Diet for a Cell

Grant

Table of Contents

I.   Abstract

II.   Description

III.  Rationale

IV.  Potential Impact

V.   Evaluation Plan

VI.  Project Calender

VII. Budget

Abstract

The youth of America is inundated with media emphasizing unrealistic body images and various diet trends. As a result of this constant exposure, students are left vulnerable to unhealthy nutrition practices. Through this six- week long project, high school students of all backgrounds will become educated consumers. They will question the physiological impacts of diet trends through active scientific processes. In the curriculum, students must design and test the ideal diet for a mealworm supplemented by concurrent benchmark instruction. Students will gain factual and procedural knowledge via inquiry based learning as recommend by the National Science Education Standards. We expect students to enter the community with the ability to question the veracity of diet trends and maintain a healthy body image. Participating in a debate, conducting an experiment, and producing a scientific presentation enables students to become educators themselves and will enforce the knowledge they have gained.

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Description

Through a six-week unit focusing on nutrition, students will learn to make better health choices and become better consumers. Incorporating relevant benchmark lessons, this unit will challenge students to design and implement a diet for mealworms. The students will learn about important components to nutrition and will see the effects of their choices on the mealworms. Using scientific processes, the students will analyze and discuss the results of the chosen nutritional plans and apply it to human consumption. As the students continue their research, they will be exposed to mechanisms of cellular metabolism; they will be able to observe other animals feeding; they will gain an insight on the responsibilities of a registered dietician; and, they will engage in classroom discussions on current diet trends. The unit will culminate in a series of presentations open to parents and other community members to help increase awareness about nutrition and help others learn to make better nutritional choices.

In developing this unit, we have worked closely with a registered dietician. This has led us to better understand the issues facing American youth and ways to better prepare them to make healthy nutritional decisions. Though this topic may be sensitive to some students, we will incorporate components of our lessons to better understand, not criticize, why people make unhealthy choices. By helping students to understand nutrition, we will equip them with the necessary tools to make better decisions, but will not require that they follow strict nutritional guidelines.

By gaining knowledge of how to make better nutritional decisions, the students will be able to understand what they see on nutrition labels, and know what physiological effects a fad diet, like Atkin's, will have. This unit may not change the way each student views his or her own body or the things that he or she eats, but it aims to increase awareness of the healthy or unhealthy decisions the students make everyday. As students gain this knowledge, they will be able to share it with their family and friends and become educators themselves.

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Rationale

Turn on your TV, drive a few blocks, listen to the radio, and walk into just about any restaurant, and you're sure to encounter some form of commercialization for dieting. Atkin's, South Beach, diet pills, and weight-loss programs are diet trends that are common in the American market. With the prevalence in today's media and the focus on body images, students of any school are affected by the hype driven by media around these products and trends.

The project is intended to provoke students to question fad diets. They will discover the biological mechanisms behind dieting by implementing a diet of their own design on mealworms. The students will monitor the mealworms as they progress through the unit to evaluate the effects of the diet they designed. With help from registered dietician Elizabeth Wilkes, the students will apply the knowledge gained from the mealworm model and draw a parallel to human dietary needs. By gaining a better understanding of nutrition and the physiological effects of nutrition, the students will be able make more informed choices as consumers. They will question the veracity of advertisements and claims made by manufacturers and promote healthy choices to the community in a culmination presentation.

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Potential Impact

The project we plan to implement with our students will instill personal ownership of ideas and skills that students can carry with them and pass on throughout their lives. At the completion of the "diet project," they will understand the importance of questioning the validity of claims made by companies driven to make money off of ignorance. The information they learn in a typical biology unit is not necessarily important to students on a personal level. By incorporating a unit that individually impacts students' lives, they will play more active roles in the scientific process and learn the science behind science.

The specific goals of the project include: having students design and implement a diet for meal worms based on researching cellular and organ needs; having students consider the impact of nutrition on physiology; having students evaluate the validity of claims made by various popular diets; producing more active consumers; and engaging students in science. At the end of the project, students will pass on their scientific findings to parents, teachers, and other interested students in a presentation that will include aspects of the project from procedure to results. The number of people that could be impacted is school-wide in the least. However, having students that are more conscious of the decisions they make could propagate effects through the community.

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Evaluation Plan

The length and structure of this project do not adhere to standard teaching instruction. Students are not cycling through the traditional pattern of lecture, lab, and test. As stated in The National Science Education Standards, teachers must call for teaching "science as process" in which students learn essential skills such as observing, inferring, and experimenting. Of utmost importance is the idea of inquiry instruction, the core of learning science. In this project, students must search for the ideal diet for our organism, incorporating inquiry-based learning. In completing this task, they fulfill the standards set forth by the National Science Education. The breadth of this project ensures that many techniques will be necessary to evaluate the students' progress towards our intended goals and towards national standards.

By completing this project the students will be educated consumers and be able to question the validity of fad diet trends. Progress towards this goal will be difficult to directly assess because it is impossible for us to shop with them at the grocery store. However, we can assess the project's progress in the classroom. Assessment of the students progress on the project will be both formative and summative. At the end of each week, there are assessments of the topic relating to diet and nutrition covered that week. In the middle of the project, the students will conduct a debate of the current fad diets. At the end of the project, the students must give a presentation to the rest of the class during the school day and to parents and other educators at conference night. This allows the family, which is an integral part in a child's education, to participate.

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Project Calendar

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Budget

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