Primary Source Exemplar: Nutrition and Human Rights
Reviewed and Revised by Odell Education
Unit Abstract
In this unit, students examine the question: How does access to a specific diet (nutrition) impact human rights? As students explore biological information on how the human body uses food as a source of energy, they will explore the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) document, to examine the crucial question of how access to a proper diet is related to a person’s rights.
This unit focuses on the right for all organisms (including humans) to have adequate food (Article 25). Students will access primary source texts, websites, and databases to examine:
different types of food sources
the impact these food sources have on the body and ecology
how natural selection has produced specific food desires
how access, or lack thereof, to different types food sources can lead to malnutrition
how foods can be substituted for better or worse
This unit leaves room for teachers to decide how to provide direct instruction on topics such as cellular respiration, ecological energy transfer, natural selection and energy content of foods. Throughout the unit, the teacher can choose how to provide direct instruction on these integral biology content areas. Teacher may choose to use lectures, PowerPoints or textbook support to provide direct instruction. Whenever direct instruction is needed, the phrase “Direct Instruction necessary” will be included.
To demonstrate their mastery of both literacy and concepts in biology, students complete a final assessment in which they study and analyze how a change in diet can have both positive personal and ecological impacts. Extensions can include examining how to address a nutritional barrier for those who do not have access to an appropriate diet. Both require students to demonstrate how the respective change addresses the rights as laid out in the UDHR.
Source List
Anchor Source
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Notes about Text Complexity: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a challenging text for high school students to read independently. The UDHL Preamble, when punctuated with commas as in its original publication, presents readers with a sentence of 321 words to read and decode. Even when the Preamble is broken into separate “Whereas” statements by inserting periods, the text still measures at 1710 Lexiles, well above the Grade 11-12 complexity band. Students will likely need guidance and modeling to derive meaning from this part of the primary source text. The particular article (#25) used for this unit measures at 1440L, and should be more accessible to students due to its length and clear language.
Notes about Use in This Unit: The text is used in this unit to make connections between crucial concepts surrounding nutrition, ecological impacts of food choices, and food as a source of energy to the political concept of human rights, and specifically, the universal right to “a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food.” Note that students may need support in understanding what this document represents. Many students may not be familiar with the United Nations and its role in defining, monitoring and securing the “universal” rights of people all over the world. Since students will be familiar with the Bill of Rights, it may prove to be a helpful entry point into the subject of a political body ensuring rights of a people.
Supporting Sources
Human Rights Indicators: A Guide to Measurement and Implementation
Notes about Text Complexity: This comprehensive guide presents many mathematical and graphic displays containing information about human rights indicators, as well as explanatory text at a fairly high reading level (the Introduction measures at 1490L). Students will likely read or interpret only selected sections of the 176 page guide, and may need support in interpreting its technical language.
Notes about Use in This Unit: This text presents many opportunities for students to think about the relationship of mathematics and statistical indicators to real world problems, in this case measuring the degree to which human rights indicators are being achieved. Students might be guided to read/interpret selected sections of the text, doing close reading of relevant quotations or explanations and/or studying mathematical displays or metadata sheets of key indicators such as Indicator 10 (p. 155), which relates to Article 25 of the UDHR. [Note: Metadata Sheet measures at 1600L.] Primary Source Lesson Two presents students with activities involving the reading and interpretation of selected text and displays from this comprehensive resource.
Notes about Text Complexity: N/A. Although the text includes a description of the information included, its data set will be used for the purposes of this unit.
Notes about Use in This Unit: The report provides data sets on estimates of consumption of specific foods by people living in households in the United States. Students will use this report to compare their own food intake of specific foods over a 2-day period.
An evolutionary perspective on food and human taste
Notes about Text Complexity: The text measures at 1480L mostly due to technical vocabulary. The text is written clearly and concisely and should be accessible to most secondary students.
Notes about Use in This Unit: This text is used to introduce students to the idea of how humans developed certain tastes for survival needs and how specific taste preferences would benefit the human race. The text traces this very evolution of taste to today’s problem of undernourished as well as overweight populations. The text is also a good example of a peer reviewed, scientific report. While only the abstract is needed for the purposes of this unit, teachers may also want their students to read the entire article depending on their classroom needs.
Evolutionary biology: The lost appetites
Notes about Text Complexity: At 1280L, this is an accessible text for secondary students.
Notes about Use in This Unit: This journal article is more accessible than the PubMed publication, and may be more appropriate given the students’ reading levels. Its narrative style and development of the topic of taste as an evolutionary (i.e. natural selection) tool also makes it a great supplementary resource to the more academic article “An evolutionary perspective on food and human taste.”
“Taste and Evolve,” Ayako Suwa; “Tour the Tongue”
Notes about Text Complexity: The Ted Talk is a highly accessible video featuring a direct translation from Japanese. The PBS website is a highly interactive site that should stimulate students’ interest and provide a good opportunity to identify and discuss textual details.
Notes about Use in This Unit: Both the TED Talk and the PBS website serve as good supplements to support students’ understanding of taste and its role in evolution.
Nutrition: Child malnutrition country estimates (WHO global database)
Notes about Text Complexity: The website provides data on children under five that are: overweight, stunted, underweight, and wasted (in respective data sets). The sets can be searched by country where figures are given for year, percent of males, females, and combined. Depending on students’ experience searching data sets, the teacher may need to first guide students through a country or two and identify what the numbers correspond to.
Notes about Use in This Unit: The data set is used to show students how malnourished children can be both underweight and overweight. Of particular interest is the fact that the sets are categorized by country, making it very easy to compare values between countries. The teacher may ask students to note which countries have higher percentages than others for various categories (e.g. overweight) and make inferences as to why that is the case. The set also gives students an opportunity to use another data set to find specific trends in the data. Some computers do not show the entire data set on the website, but the data set can be downloaded as Excel or HTML flat table.
Effect of insulin on glucose uptake and metabolism
Notes about Text Complexity: N/A. This text is a diagram of the effect of insulin on glucose uptake and metabolism.
Notes about Use in This Unit: The diagram is used to explore the metabolism and storage of carbohydrates in humans. This direct instruction on the fate of excess carbs will help students see how both over- and under-nutrition can affect the health of an organism.
Artificial sweeteners produce the counterintuitive effect of inducing metabolic derangements
Notes about Text Complexity: The text measures at 1500L mostly due to technical terminology, such as saccharin and metabolic syndrome. The abstract and full text, however, are written clearly and should be accessible to secondary students with appropriate guiding questions. The text includes an accessible organizational format where each section is clearly titled, using bold and italicized fonts.
Notes about Use in This Unit: This text introduces the students to the concept of substituting meals for other types of foods. This text, as well as the CNN article in source #9, also introduces students to the idea that some foods are barriers to healthy eating. Students read this text in order to gain the skill of identifying central themes in a text. Both this and the following article from CNN provide students with opportunities to analyze the central message(s) of the texts.
Study: Diet soda may do more harm than good
Notes about Text Complexity: The article measures at 1360L. Teachers can choose this text over the abstract of the Swithers report. Like the Swithers piece, the article contains some difficult terminology, but is written in a very accessible style. The piece includes quotes from Swithers and presents information from opposing sides.
Notes about Use in This Unit: The news article is a summary of research and uses more accessible language to report the scientist’s findings. The article also mentions that there is some disagreement about whether artificial sweeteners are more or less safe than real sugar. A video, titled “Real or fake sugar: Does it matter?,” is also available. The video should only be used as a supplementary resource for either article.
Notes about Text Complexity: The texts found on pubmed.gov are academic in nature, so students will most likely need support to access them.
Notes about Use in This Unit: Students access this repository in the unit to search for specific nutritional barriers to equal and appropriate nutritional access.
Notes about Text Complexity: The resource measures at 1380L.
Notes about Use in This Unit: This report is based on the malnutrition data sets students have already accessed. The introduction of this paper emphasizes the multiple ways children can be malnourished and presents data tools that can be used to measure those rates. By using this intro, allowing students to perform research and examining the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the class can outline how access to proper nutrition is of global concern.
Standards Alignment
The instructional methods and learning activities in this unit align to the Common Core standards for grades 9-12 in a variety of ways. By relying on primary documents students analyze key ideas and details by citing textual evidence to support their analysis of the text and the major themes the text presents. Students analyze the craft and structure of texts by determining technical and scientific terminology as well as interpret how information in charts and graphs are organized. Finally, students integrate knowledge and ideas by comparing information presented in primary texts as well as their own field notes.
ELA/Literacy Grade Level Standards
CCSS R-1 - Cite specific textual evidence to support analysis of science and technical texts.
CCSS R-2 Determine the central ideas or conclusions of a text; provide an accurate summary of the text distinct from prior knowledge or opinions.
CCSS R-7 Integrate quantitative or technical information expressed in words in a text with a version of that information expressed visually (e.g., in a flowchart, diagram, model, graph, or table).
CCSS W-1 Write arguments focused on discipline-specific content.
CCSS W-7 Conduct short research projects to answer a question (including a self-generated question), drawing on several sources and generating additional related, focused questions that allow for multiple avenues of exploration.
Next Generation Science Standards
HS-LS1-7 Use a model to illustrate that cellular respiration is a chemical process whereby the bonds of food molecules and oxygen molecules are broken and the bonds in new compounds are formed resulting in a net transfer of energy.
HS-LS2-3 Construct and revise an explanation based on evidence for the cycling of matter and flow of energy in aerobic and anaerobic conditions.
HS-LS2-7 Design, evaluate, and refine a solution for reducing the impacts of human activities on the environment and biodiversity.
HS-LS4-4 Construct an explanation based on evidence for how natural selection leads to adaptation of populations.
Developing Student Literacy
Rationale
Throughout the unit, students routinely examine textual evidence from primary sources that range in difficulty and presentation (text, graphs, etc.). Students begin by examining an accessible document that displays quantitative information in the form of charts. They then turn to a more complex abstract where they are asked to analyze the main idea presented in the text. Students focus on another data set in lesson three and begin to make connections between energy in food and equal accessibility to food. In lesson 4, students make direct connections to food inequality and human rights issues. In lessons 5, 6 and the cumulative assessment, students make connections to how manipulating the food web can have other impacts on ecological relationships.
This sequence provides students the opportunity to analyze both textual documents as well as texts that portray data sets, both of which are common in the science field. Students address both teacher and student developed questions by writing in journals they keep throughout the unit. The unit’s learning activities culminate in a demanding writing task where students must synthesize information both from texts they have read and notes they have taken.
CCSS Areas of Focus
Reading Text Closely: Makes reading text(s) closely, examining textual evidence, and discerning deep meaning a central focus of instruction.
Explanation: In each lesson, students close read a primary source document, first focusing on the details and main ideas, and then applying this information to the general focus of the lesson.
Text Based Evidence: Facilitates rich and rigorous evidence based discussions and writing about common texts through a sequence of specific, thought provoking, and text dependent questions (including, when applicable, questions about illustrations, charts, diagrams, audio/video, and media).
Explanation: The primary sources range in type and difficulty. They include academic texts from scientific journals, datasets from government international organization websites, as well as journal articles and videos. Students, either in groups or as a class, focus on guiding questions to facilitate their close reading and discussion of the texts. These questions scaffold students’ reading and comprehension of the texts, while also providing avenues for class discussions and linking the content of the text to the lesson and/or unit’s central question.
Writing from Sources: Routinely expects that students draw evidence from texts to produce clear and coherent writing that informs, explains, or makes an argument in various written forms (e.g., notes, summaries, short responses, or formal essays).
Explanation: As students close read from primary sources, they annotate, make claims and write an expository paragraph, all of which draw on evidence in the texts. As a summative assessment, students write a proposal where they are expected to cite the sources they have read in the unit, as well as their own researched materials.
Academic Vocabulary: Focuses on building students’ academic vocabulary in context throughout instruction.
Explanation: While varying in difficulty, each primary source use academic vocabulary that is directly related to the topic of this unit. Students will either need to be provided with a list of vocabulary terms, or determine the key terms through close reading.
Building Disciplinary Knowledge: Provides opportunities for students to build knowledge about a topic or subject through analysis of a coherent selection of strategically sequenced, discipline-specific texts.
Explanation: The primary sources used in this unit are geared to increase students’ understanding of how diet and nutrition are linked to both biological and ecological processes. They reinforce student’s understanding of these processes while also affording them the opportunity to learn content knowledge from primary source documents. Finally, the anchor text, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, offers the opportunity for students to use content knowledge from the field of biology, in another, real-world, political forum.
Direct Learning Through Questions
Essential Question
How does access to a specific diet (nutrition) affect people’s basic human rights?
This question links students’ knowledge of food as a source of energy to an organism, of how specific diets can lead to health issues (e.g. malnourishment), and the ecological implications from choosing certain foods over others to the general concept of universal human rights.
As the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states in Article #25, “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food.” By analyzing both data sets and informational texts, students explore the relationship between diet and nutrition, and then analyze how the issue of access to proper nutrition can be considered a human rights issue as well as a health issue. In the summative assessment students will be able to create a local action plan for nutrition shifts by incorporating their research on malnutrition, ecological efficiency and human rights.
Supporting Questions
What are human rights?
What do you eat?
Why do you eat?
Where do food sources come from?
Are all foods equal in nutritional value and ecological impact?
How do changes in the human food supply affect the rest of the ecosystem?
How can we make significant shifts in our thoughts about nutrition?
Text Based Questions
The reading task of each lesson provides guiding questions that are designed to scaffold student’s close reading of the lesson’s texts, as well as to apply what is written in the text to the over all content of the unit. These questions range from specific, detail-oriented questions such as “How often and how much macaroni and cheese to people eat?” to analytical questions such as “Why is energy homeostasis important?”
Integrate Learning Across Disciplines
Integrated Learning Sequence
While designed for secondary science classrooms, the unit on nutrition integrates learning from science, social studies, ELA and math. The unit draws heavily from primary documents where students will read and analyze both text and data sets in order to grasp key concepts around nutrition, ecology and human rights. Key science concepts are taught based on using these texts as well as from direct instruction from the teacher. These texts require students to attend to details, main ideas and themes and relate and integrate information from several texts. Students will also develop math skills by conducting calculations related to the 10% energy transfer rule and the energy an organism derives from specific foods.
Subject Area Standards, Key Areas of Focus, and/or Essential Ideas
The Math Key Shifts include:
Rigor: Application: Provides opportunities for students to independently apply mathematical concepts in real-world situations and solve challenging problems with persistence, choosing and applying an appropriate model or strategy to new situations.
Conceptual Understanding: Develops students’ conceptual understanding through tasks, brief problems, questions, multiple representations and opportunities for students to write and speak about their understanding.
Procedural Skill and Fluency: Expects, supports and provides guidelines for procedural skill and fluency with core calculations and mathematical procedures (when called for in the standards for the grade) to be performed quickly and accurately.
Align Assessment with Instruction
Culminating/Summative Assessment Task
In the main content summative tasks, students create a local action plan for creating diets based on energy needs by incorporating research on malnutrition and ecological efficiency. The assessment requires students to review the passages and data sets they have read, as well as their notes in their journals. Students must analyze and synthesize information across both informational texts and data sets, writing claims based on their review of texts and write evidence-based proposals.
In the additional optional summative assessment, students will further connect their biology knowledge to the human right of access to food. Students will write a proposal that suggests solutions to barriers to equitable diets. In writing these proposals, students make over-arching connections between childhood malnutrition, barriers to food equity and the impact of human nutrition on the global ecosystem. Students must evaluate and select top priorities that should be addressed by governmental sources and evaluate positive and negative effects of their proposed solutions.
Formative Assessment Strategies
Throughout the unit, teachers can conduct both informal and formal assessments by asking guiding questions about the readings during class and reviewing students’ written work. The students will engage in various writing activities, ranging from creating their own food map to writing claims about informational texts they have read. These provide opportunities to the teacher to monitor student progress in analyzing texts and applying new concepts in research environment. Having studied primary texts and conduct their own field work, students will be able to:
Determine over-arching trends in human diet by analyzing a national study.
Evaluate the effectiveness of their diet by comparing data from their own food survey to data from a national study.
Evaluate the efficiency of their diet by tracking the transfer of energy.
Evaluate the claim “The average human diet is meeting nutritional needs.”
Determine the central idea of a scientific research paper by analyzing an abstract.
Make and support a claim regarding modified diets.
Evaluate the need for energy consumption by comparing respiration rates.
Evaluate human preference for flavor by examining evolutionary trends in nutrition.
Determine trends about child malnutrition by analyzing a data set.
Make claims about the nutritional value of meal substitutes by researching examples.
Evaluate reasons for childhood malnutrition by comparing energy input with energy output.
Make a claim regarding nutritional strategies that benefit humans without negative effects on the ecosystem.
Evaluate if human nutrition rights are violated by analyzing political shifts in nutrition.
Craft a proposal for human nutrition initiatives by applying research on ecologically efficient nutrition methods.
Evaluate possible suggestions for decreasing human impact on food webs by comparing proposals.
NOTE: This assessment can involve collaborative research and discussion, but students should be individually responsible for the final analyses and products they develop. Students might demonstrate their understanding through an informal written explanation, a more formal evidence-based argument, a speech or participation in a symposium, or a multi-media presentation, as appropriate to the classroom situation.
Consider Background Knowledge and Prerequisite Skills
Prerequisite Learning
This unit is designed to be placed anywhere in the biology curriculum and has specifically indicated where direct instruction is required. Some teachers place ecological topics first and others place ecology at the end of the course. This unit is designed to assume no prior knowledge/conceptual understanding on behalf of the biology student and it provides specific opportunities for teachers to deliver content knowledge. With respect to prerequisite skills, students will be reading abstracts from academic, peer reviewed journals. These will require the student to already be familiar with reading closely for details and analyzing main themes in grade-level texts.
Pre-assessment of Readiness for Learning
Central to this unit are the abilities to interpret text and displays independently. In each lesson, students independently complete short written exercises that can serve as a pre-assessment of these skills and knowledge; similarly, the teacher can track the development of mathematical thinking and understanding through exercises within each of the biology lessons. The teacher can then tailor instruction and assessment in succeeding lessons based on what these initial and ongoing informal assessments indicate.
Provide Support While Building Toward Independence
Strategies for Supporting All Students and Building Independence
The unit emphasizes modeling as a primary scaffold so that at each lesson, the students move from modeling, guided practice, to independent practice. For the academic texts, the teacher highlights specific, academic vocabulary, and asks guiding questions that focus on specific details of the text. These methods provide support for students who are ELL, have disabilities, or read well below grade level.
Students also conduct field work and will bring in their own experiences into the classroom These experiences (noting what food they eat over two days), provide a good entry point into the unit’s main theme and will support students to understand the unit’s objectives and texts. A variety of texts are recommended for the unit, ranging from scientific texts, to data sets, to videos. By differentiating the texts, students with different learning abilities have more opportunities to access content information and excel. Finally, with each lesson, there are suggested readings that are more accessible to ELLs, or below grade level readers. These texts do not compromise content, but do present it at a more accessible level and format.
Additional Suggestions for Support/Extension
English language learners, students with disabilities, and below-grade level readers
The texts used in this unit, particularly the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), present complex reading challenges for all high school students, much less those who are not native speakers/readers or who are not reading at the upper high school level. However, there is a wealth of online resources available to support students who will have difficulty accessing the text(s). As indicated in the instructional notes for Lesson 1, students can be assigned simpler sections of the UDHR Preamble or Articles, and/or can read a simplified, alternate version of the UDHR Articles found at the Youth for Human Rights website: http://www.youthforhumanrights.org/what-are-human-rights/universal-declaration-of-human-rights/articles-1-15.html
For more visual learners, background knowledge and support can be provided by using one or more of the many YouTube videos that have been developed to present and interpret the UDHR, some of which use animation and other visually interesting means of conveying meaning. [Search YouTube for “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”]
When working with websites and databases, students may need additional support to navigate sites and to understand how data is organized in various displays. While the unit presents instruction for all students in understanding the layout of tables and matrices, some students may need additional instruction/review and the use of scaffolding such as graphic organizers that illustrate how horizontal and vertical axes organize information – both ideas and numbers - into cells.
Many alternative texts and videos are provided that provide access to the same content information but in more accessible language. These sources may be used both as alternative and supplemental texts in the unit.
Above grade-level readers and/or advanced biology students
The unit already presents challenging text and data sources for such students to read and analyze, but also offers many opportunities for differentiation and advanced work. Advanced students can take on the more challenging sections of the UDHR and can do independent research to find additional sources of information about both human rights and how nutrition affects those rights.
Lesson Sequence
Lesson #1: What do you eat?
Making a diet journal, food webs and interpreting information from a database
Lesson #2: Why do you eat?
Interpreting primary sources and writing claims about diet and nutrition
Lesson #3: Are all foods equal?
Interpreting primary sources and writing claims about nutritional strategies
Lesson #4: How is access to food a human rights issue?
Interpreting primary sources and applying content to human rights as an ethical issue
Lesson #5: What are barriers to appropriate and equitable nutrition?
Researching for primary sources
Lesson #6: How do changes in the human food supply affect the rest of the ecosystem?
Summative Assessment: How can we solve nutritional barriers while minimizing negative ecological impacts?