Students made the connection that their flashlights in the lab represented a "star" and the wall represented "Earth" to help them solidify their understanding of apparent brightness. Students set up their labs on the floor around the classroom, and we turned off the lights and closed the blinds to make it easier to measure the diameter of the beam of light. We used the strategies of Zembal-Saul, McNeill, and Hershberger (2013) to scaffold this thinking and writing for students in a step-by-step manner and continued having students use lab materials to make concrete connections to the data in their graphs. [Extracted from the article]