Lesson plan Grade 12 English Language Arts
How a Nitrate Finding Changed Across Four Burnt Fork Documents
A 50-minute grade 12 lesson tracing one well survey finding through a press release, a news summary, and a flyer, then writing an accurate attribution.
Objectives
- Students will identify the specific alteration each document makes to a survey's original finding.
- Students will classify alterations as a dropped qualifier, a changed population, a changed certainty, or an evaluative substitution.
- Students will write an attribution sentence and an explanatory paragraph that preserve a study's stated limits.
Vocabulary
- Nitrate
- Nitrate is a form of nitrogen that plants use as food. It gets into water from fertilizer, animal waste, and septic systems, and too much of it is unhealthy for both people and streams.
Also: attribution, population sampled, voluntary sampling, evaluative substitution, qualifier
Teacher overview
A finding rarely reaches the public in the words its authors used. It passes through a press release, a news summary, and whatever a community group prints, and each step drops or adds something. This lesson follows one sentence from a fictional well survey through three such steps and asks students to name exactly what changed at each one. The misconception the lesson is built to correct is that a restatement is accurate as long as every word in it is true of somebody: students tend to accept the news summary because wells really were tested and some really did exceed the standard, and they need to see that the change from wells tested to wells in the basin is the alteration that actually misleads.
Procedure
Framing the situation (5 min): Tell students that a state agency sampled private wells in a farming basin and published a finding, and that three other documents then reported the same finding. Ask them to predict which kind of writer will distort it most, and record the predictions to revisit at the end.
Reading the source sentence (8 min): Students read Document 1 on the handout and list, in the margin, every limit the survey places on its own result. Take three or four responses aloud, and require students to point to the words rather than paraphrase. Build a checklist on the board from what they find, since that checklist is the standard against which the other three documents are measured.
Document comparison in groups (17 min): In groups of three, students work through handout items 1 through 6, comparing Documents 2, 3, and 4 to the checklist. Assign each group member one downstream document to track first, then require the group to reach agreement on item 5 before moving on. Circulate and press groups that call a document "biased" to name the specific word or phrase that carries the bias.
Formative check (5 min): Ask the whole class one question: which single change across the four documents most affects a well owner's decision about whether to test her own water? Take a vote among the four candidate changes listed on the board. If fewer than half the class identifies the shift from wells tested to wells in the basin, re-read Documents 2 and 3 side by side before continuing.
Attribution and paragraph (13 min): Students complete handout items 7 and 8 independently, writing the ranking, one accurate attribution sentence, and the explanatory paragraph for a well owner.
Closure (2 min): Return to the predictions from the opening. Name the finding the lesson supports: the largest distortion in the chain was introduced by the news summary rather than by the advocacy flyer, because the summary changed who the claim covered while the flyer only intensified language a reader can see is heated.
Student Handout
The Burnt Fork basin, Hallett County, the survey, and all four documents below are fictional and were written for this lesson. Read them in order, then answer the questions.
Document 1. Sentence from the state survey report, Burnt Fork Basin Private Well Study
Of the 214 private wells sampled in the Burnt Fork basin between 2023 and 2025, 19 returned nitrate concentrations above the drinking water standard. Participation was voluntary, and sampled wells were concentrated in the basin's northern third, where row-crop acreage is highest. The survey does not support an estimate for the basin as a whole.
Document 2. Press release, Hallett County Health Department
A state survey found that nearly one in ten private wells tested in the Burnt Fork basin exceeded the drinking water standard for nitrate. The Department urges well owners to have their water tested and will offer reduced-cost sampling this fall.
Document 3. Regional news summary
A state study found that nearly one in ten wells in the Burnt Fork basin are unsafe to drink.
Document 4. Flyer, Burnt Fork Neighbors for Clean Water
One in ten Burnt Fork wells is poisoned, and the state has known since 2023.
- Copy the three limits Document 1 places on its own finding.
- Document 1 reports 19 wells out of 214. Document 2 describes that as "nearly one in ten." Show the arithmetic and state whether the description is fair.
- Document 2 uses one word that limits its claim to the wells in the sample, and Document 3 removes it. Identify the word, and explain what its removal changes about who the claim covers.
- Document 3 replaces "exceeded the drinking water standard" with "unsafe to drink." Explain what the substitution adds, and name what a reader would need to know to judge whether it is warranted.
- Document 4 makes three changes to Document 3. Name each change, then classify it as a dropped qualifier, a changed population, a changed certainty, or an evaluative substitution.
- Document 4 says the state has known since 2023. Compare that with Document 1, and explain the problem with the claim.
- Rank the four documents by how badly a reader relying on that document alone would misjudge the risk to a well owner in the basin's southern half. Justify your first and last placements.
- Write one sentence that attributes the finding to the survey accurately. Then write a paragraph of five to seven sentences explaining the finding to a well owner in the basin. Preserve every limit Document 1 states, and do not tell the owner what to conclude about her own well.
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: Participation was voluntary; the sampled wells were concentrated in the basin's northern third, where row-crop acreage is highest; and the survey does not support an estimate for the basin as a whole.
- Answer: Yes, the description is fair. Dividing 19 by 214 gives about 0.089, or roughly 8.9 percent, which is just under one in ten, and "nearly one in ten" reports that honestly.
- Answer: The word is "tested." Document 2 says nearly one in ten wells tested exceeded the standard, which is a claim about the sample. Document 3 says nearly one in ten wells in the basin, which is a claim about every well there, and the survey states plainly that it does not support an estimate of that kind.
- Answer: The substitution adds a conclusion about consequences that the survey did not make. Exceeding a drinking water standard is a measured comparison against a threshold, while "unsafe to drink" is a judgment about harm to a particular person. To judge whether it is warranted a reader would need to know how far above the standard the results ran, who in the household drinks the water, and whether the standard is set with a margin below the level where harm begins.
- Answer: Document 4 drops "nearly," which is a dropped qualifier that turns an approximation into an exact rate. It replaces "unsafe to drink" with "poisoned," which is an evaluative substitution that implies deliberate contamination and acute harm. It adds "the state has known since 2023," which is a changed certainty, since it converts an ongoing study into settled knowledge the state withheld.
- Answer: Document 1 gives 2023 as the beginning of a sampling period that ran through 2025, not the date of a result. A survey cannot report a finding before it has finished collecting the data, so the claim that the state knew in 2023 mistakes the start of the work for the conclusion of it.
- Answer: Accept any defensible ranking that places Document 1 as least misleading and gives a reason. A strong response ranks Document 3 as the most misleading for a southern-half well owner, because it is the document that converts a sample drawn mostly from the northern third into a claim about the whole basin, which is precisely the inference that owner would otherwise not make. Document 4 is heated but visibly so, and it repeats Document 3's population error rather than introducing a new one.
- Answer: Accept any attribution sentence that names the survey, the sample rather than the basin, and at least one limit, for example: "A state survey of 214 voluntarily sampled private wells in the Burnt Fork basin, most of them in the basin's northern third, found nitrate above the drinking water standard in 19 of them." The paragraph should report the count and the share, state that participation was voluntary and geographically concentrated, state that the survey does not support a basin-wide estimate, and stop short of telling the reader what her own well contains.
Differentiation
Support
Provide the four documents printed in parallel columns with the shared phrases already aligned across rows, so students compare wording without holding four texts in mind at once. Give the checklist from Document 1 already written out, and allow items 1 through 4 to be answered in phrases rather than sentences.
Extension
Ask students to write the correction Document 3's editor should run, in under fifty words, and then a short note explaining why a correction that fixes only the evaluative language would leave the more serious error in place.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "survey," "sample," "voluntary," "standard," and "attribution" with a short definition and one everyday example for each, such as the difference between asking everyone in a class and asking whoever volunteers. Provide a two-column chart headed "what the survey said" and "what this document says" for students to fill in while reading, and offer a frame for item 3: "Document 3 removed ___, which changes the claim from ___ to ___."