As part of developing these activities, the SIMPLE Science team also designed a pedagogical template to keep the lessons consistent in length. LessonAide is
(a) based on the Understanding by Design approach of Wiggins and McTighe (1998) in that the lesson format begins with stating the National Science Education Standard that the lesson will address and then
(b) employs the 5 E educational model (Bybee, Achieving Scientific Literacy, 1997) to provide structure for all of the SIMPLE Science lessons.

The backwards design approach of the Understanding by Design model is used to focus the materials developer on the “Big Idea” to be taught by each lesson and the measurable evidence that is going to be deemed acceptable in judging whether a student truly understands the lesson’s Big Idea. 
The Big Idea for each lesson is one standard from the National Science Education Standards.
“Measurable evidence” is two to three performance measures, including proper answers to true-false, multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and short-answer questions; accurate measurement from an image; correct matching of terms with definitions or descriptions with images; or successful accomplishment of a variety of other tasks.

Click here to download a PDF document (164kb) of LessonAide as used by the team to build the "Hand It to the Animals" lesson.

Click here to download a blank interactive LessonAide Microsoft Word document (84kb) that you can use to build your own SIMPLE-style lesson.