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Lesson plan Grade 9 English Language Arts

Narrowing a Research Question About Wrenmarsh's Old Water Mains

A grade 9 ELA research lesson where students narrow a broad question about a fictional town's aging water mains and test four supplied sources against it.

Objectives

  1. Students will narrow a broad research question into one that a named source could actually answer.
  2. Students will judge whether a given source answers, partly answers, or fails to answer a research question.
  3. Students will explain why an anecdote does not settle a question about a whole system.

Vocabulary

Water main
A big underground pipe that carries drinking water beneath the streets to a neighborhood. Smaller service lines branch off it to reach each building.

Also: research question, scope, source, anecdote, inventory

Teacher overview

A research question such as "Is our water system falling apart?" cannot be answered by any source, because nothing in it says what would count as evidence. This lesson gives students a fictional town, Wrenmarsh, and four supplied sources about its water mains, then asks them to turn a broad worry into a question those sources can actually settle. The lesson targets one habit in particular, which is treating a source as relevant whenever it mentions the topic. That habit produces a national statistic offered as the answer to a local question, or one neighbor's flooded basement offered as a description of a whole system. Because every source is supplied in the handout, the lesson can run in one period without any outside searching.

Procedure

Hook (5 min): Write the question "Is Wrenmarsh's water system falling apart?" on the board and ask students to name, out loud, one thing a person would need to know to answer it. Record the responses. Point out that the class has just produced several smaller questions, and that these are usually more useful than the original.

Direct instruction (12 min): Define research question, scope, and anecdote. Explain the two ways a question can fail: it can be too broad to answer with any available evidence, or so narrow that answering it settles nothing worth knowing. Model narrowing "Is Wrenmarsh's water system falling apart?" into one workable version, thinking aloud about what a source would have to contain. Then model rejecting one source that mentions pipes but cannot answer the narrowed question.

Guided practice (13 min): Distribute the Student Handout. Working in pairs, students complete items 1 through 4, writing their narrowed question and testing the first two sources against it. Circulate and challenge any pair whose narrowed question still uses an unmeasurable word such as "bad," "failing," or "safe" without saying how it would be judged.

Independent work (17 min): Students complete items 5 through 9 alone, judging the remaining sources, identifying what the set does not tell them, and writing the closing explanatory paragraph in item 9.

Closure and exit ticket (8 min): Call on three students to read their narrowed questions, and ask the class which supplied source would answer each. Then collect item 8 on an index card as the exit ticket. Scan for students who named a missing piece of information rather than a missing opinion; if fewer than three quarters of the cards do, spend the first ten minutes of the next class comparing two sample cards side by side.

Narrowing a Research Question About Wrenmarsh's Old Water Mains — Grade 9 English Language Arts
Name: ____________________________ Date: ______________

Student Handout

Wrenmarsh is a fictional town, and every figure attributed to it below was written for this lesson.

Source A. Wrenmarsh Water Department annual report, distribution section (fictional). The department keeps an inventory of its pipe by age and material. The town owns 61 miles of water main. About 14 miles were installed before 1940 and are unlined cast iron. Crews repaired 9 main breaks last year and 6 the year before. The department replaced 1.2 miles of main last year.

Source B. ASCE 2025 Report Card for America's Infrastructure. US drinking water infrastructure received a grade of C- in 2025, and wastewater received a D+. The associated talking points state that a water main breaks somewhere in the United States roughly every two minutes.

Source C. Interview with the Wrenmarsh distribution supervisor (fictional). "The age of a pipe tells you less than people think. What matters is the soil around it and how many times it has already been repaired. Our Grandy Street main is older than the one on Coldharbor Road, and Grandy has never given us trouble."

Source D. Post in a Wrenmarsh neighborhood group (fictional). "Third time this winter my street has been dug up. This whole town is one giant leak. Nobody is doing anything."

  1. Write one reason the question "Is Wrenmarsh's water system falling apart?" cannot be answered as written.
  2. Narrow that question into one version a source could answer. Your question must name what would count as evidence.
  3. Does Source A answer your narrowed question, partly answer it, or fail to answer it? Give the specific detail that decides your judgment.
  4. Source B is accurate and published, yet it may still be the wrong source here. Explain what Source B can and cannot tell a reader about Wrenmarsh.
  5. Source C disagrees with a common assumption about old pipes. State the assumption the supervisor is arguing against.
  6. Explain why Source D does not settle a question about the whole town, even if every word in it is true.
  7. Rank the four sources from most to least useful for your narrowed question, and give one reason for the source you ranked last.
  8. Name one specific piece of information none of the four sources supplies that you would need before answering your narrowed question.
  9. Write one explanatory paragraph of four to six sentences stating what these four sources together establish about Wrenmarsh's water mains. Use at least two sources and name each one you use.

From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.

Answer Key
  1. Answer: Accept any reason naming the scope problem, such as: "falling apart" is not defined, so no source could confirm or disconfirm it, and the question covers every part of the system at once.
  2. Answer: Accept any narrowed question that names measurable evidence, such as "How many miles of Wrenmarsh's water main were installed before 1940, and how many main breaks did crews repair in each of the last two years?" The question must state what evidence would count.
  3. Answer: Accept a judgment supported by a specific detail. Most students should say Source A answers or largely answers the question, citing the 61 miles of main, the 14 miles of pre-1940 cast iron, or the 9 breaks last year.
  4. Answer: Source B establishes that aging water infrastructure is a widespread national problem, indicated by the C- grade and the break-every-two-minutes figure. It cannot say anything about Wrenmarsh's own pipes, because it reports no local data.
  5. Answer: The assumption that a pipe's age by itself predicts whether it will fail. The supervisor argues that surrounding soil and repair history matter more, offering Grandy Street as the example.
  6. Answer: Source D reports one person's experience on one street and offers no town-wide count, no comparison, and no measurement. Repeated work on a single street is consistent with a system that is mostly sound, so the post cannot support a claim about the whole town.
  7. Answer: Accept any defensible ranking with reasoning. Most rankings should place Source A first and Source D last, on the grounds that Source D supplies no verifiable evidence and generalizes from one street.
  8. Answer: Accept any specific gap, such as how many miles of pipe are scheduled for replacement, how much water is lost to leaks each year, the repair history of the pipes that broke, or how Wrenmarsh's break rate compares with similar towns.
  9. Answer: Accept any four-to-six-sentence explanatory paragraph that names at least two sources and represents them accurately. A strong response uses Source A for the local figures, notes from Source C that age alone does not predict failure, and treats Source B as national context rather than local proof.

Differentiation

Support

Give these students two candidate narrowed questions and ask them to choose the better one and say why, rather than writing a question from scratch. Provide items 3 through 6 as a three-column chart with the headings "answers it," "partly answers it," and "does not answer it," so judgments can be recorded before they are explained.

Extension

Ask these students to write the one interview question they would ask the distribution supervisor to close the gap they named in item 8, then explain in two sentences why an answer to that question would change their paragraph in item 9.

ELL supports

Pre-teach research question, scope, source, anecdote, and inventory with a short definition and one example each. Supply sentence frames for items 4 and 6, such as "Source B tells a reader ____, but it cannot tell a reader ____," and allow the ranking in item 7 to be shown with numbered cards before it is written.

Extensions

Have students apply the same four-source test to a question about their own school, such as how much water the building uses in a month. They should name which of four kinds of source, a record, a national statistic, an expert interview, or a personal report, they would trust most, and explain the choice in one paragraph.