Now I teach science in lower middle school, and as much as I love incorporating research writing into a cross-curricular lesson, my students only really get time to explore research writing through their science fair process. So using the structure strips as they were being shown was not an option. Of course, one of my favorite things about being a teacher is creating new ways to help my students so I found a way to adapt this concept to lab investigations.
In student-driven lab investigations, one of the many goals should be to have students identify ways to solve problems, test experiments safely, and record that data on their own. These are skills that students practice throughout their science education, but they need to be carefully developed and my 6th graders are still in the beginning stages of this learning process. My thought was to use the idea of a structure strip but instead of guiding students through the essay writing process, it was going to guide my students through planning their own steps to performing a safe investigation and recording the appropriate data.
This is a very cool concept, but in this situation, a picture will probably go a long way in your understanding of what exactly I am talking about.