What do the ideas of Daniel Bernoulli—an 18th-century Swiss mathematician, physicist, natural scientist, and professor—and your students’ next landing of the space shuttle via computer simulation have in common? Because of his contribution, referred in physical science as Bernoulli’s principle, modern flight is possible. The mini learning-cycle described here explores Bernoulli’s principle with several simple activities, and highlights its application in our lives. Through this constructivist instructional strategy, students experience scientific inquiry as a process of discovery shared by humans, during which various explanations of observed phenomena are exchanged among team members.
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This lesson can be used at the beginning of the year to teach students how to conduct inquiries using the essential features described in Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996). The lesson is divided into several activities which may be spread over several days or interspersed with your other beginning-of-the-year lessons. Students learn the essential features of inquiry through direct experience by conducting an initial field-based inquiry, which helps them come to an early understanding that science is not linear.
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Inquiry skills cannot be taught in only one grade or taught only at the start of the year; and they cannot be taught by having students memorize a set of procedures and definitions for a pencil-and-paper test on “the scientific method.” To become proficient in inquiry, students must repeatedly practice these skills in challenging, content-embedded investigations until doing science and thinking like scientists become second nature. This issue of Science Scope offers an excellent selection of articles about developing inquiry skills in middle school students.
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This is the story of how a typical middle school lab was transformed into an open-ended inquiry experience through a few small, but very powerful, changes. By allowing students to follow their own questions, the classroom filled with enthusiasm and students learned much more about photosynthesis, respiration, and the scientific processes. The story begins with a brief description of the original, ultratransformed lab.
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Earth Science Week (ESW) 2008 encourages people around the globe to open doors and investigate new opportunities. This year’s theme, “No Child Left Inside,” is a call to explore our natural environments. The celebration urges everyone—especially young people—to venture outdoors and experience Earth science firsthand.
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Equipping students with knowledge, skills, attitudes, and habits of mind necessary to design investigative questions is an essential goal for any science teacher. Just as with anything new, when students begin to design investigative questions, they essentially are novices. Expertise in designing proper questions is developed over time and requires encouragement and guidance. This article promotes a tangible strategy for teachers and explains how it has been used to move students along the continuum from novices to experts in designing investigative questions.
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There is a tendency to underestimate the abilities of students to conduct inquiry due to both inferred and actual student restrictions in the traditional school setting. While some constraints exist for viable safety reasons, other constraints placed by teachers, and in some cases, by students, impede students’ willingness to do inquiry. This article describes how engendering inquiry can be accomplished with adherence to good procedure and safety awareness.
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Probability sampling is an interdisciplinary math and science skill that often serves as the precursor to conducting scientific research. This article describes a lesson that uses probability sampling to allow middle school students to investigate some questions that were interesting to them, beginning with the prevalence (or lack thereof!) of left-handed students in their school. It helped to bring math and science together in a meaningful way and allowed them to work with a fun medium to examine the ways in which researchers collect, analyze, and interpret data, and deal with problems that might arise over the course of their investigations.
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The Oregon 4-H Wildlife Stewards program has been training teachers and volunteers to convert school grounds to education sites by constructing schoolyard wildlife habitats since 1997. The publication What Can We Learn at the Pond? 4-H Wildlife Stewards Master Leader Guide (Bourdeau 2004a) was written to support the program’s focus on developing science skills. Lessons in this publication are supported by the Inquiry in Action model (Bourdeau 2004b), which provides a framework for students to use all the steps needed for science inquiry. This article illustrates how this model can be used to engage students in an investigation about life in and around ponds.
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Teaching the rock cycle can overwhelm even the most enthusiastic rock hound. As middle school science teachers, we constantly struggle with an appropriate balance between Earth system content and experiential activities. The authors have found that stations can be successfully employed to teach rock cycle content while reinforcing development of inquiry skills. Using stations, teachers are able to implement the abundance of available activities that incorporate content, standards, and inquiry skills.
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As educators, we know that math must be integrated into our subject to best communicate the essence of scientific investigation. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done when students learn subjects in isolated classrooms on a daily basis. As young scientists, students must learn to recognize trends in scientific data. In order to develop these skills, students must first practice precise techniques for recording data, and the best way to develop in students an eye for mathematic systems is to study one that they can most relate to—their own grades.
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Unfortunately, what looks good on the runway often clashes with the science laboratory when it comes to safety. Therefore, given the potential risks associated with science activities in lab and on field experiences at the middle school level, the message needs to be clear as to what is the fashion or dress expectation. In some cases, science teachers may be challenged relative to dress codes and “freedom of speech.” To help prevent these issues from being launched into bigger problems, teachers should consider the strategies outlined in this month’s column.
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The school year kicks off with a great parade of planets in the evening skies, as four of the six visible planets will make an appearance during the evening hours following sunset. For the first half of September, students will have an opportunity for viewing and comparing the relative orbital speeds of planets and the effect of Earth’s revolution. Simply look toward the west at sunset for a trio of planets a couple hand widths above the horizon. The brightest member of the trio will be Venus, greatly outshining nearby Mercury and Mars.
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Scientific inquiry, a methodology that can trace its roots back to the time and teachings of Socrates, has been an elusive and evolving part of our education lexicon for many years. The Socratic approach to teaching, in its simplest form, can be thought of as instruction that involves the use of open-ended questions and investigative queries of students rather than a teacher-centered, lecture format. For some reason, however, this straightforward idea has been difficult to translate into practice. Therefore, this article provides a blueprint for cultivating inquiry in the science classroom.
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Investigating maple samaras, or helicopter seeds, can give students a “that’s funny” experience and catalyze the development of inquiry skills. In this article, the authors describe how to use maple helicopter seeds (samaras) to engage students in focused observation and hypothesis testing. This activity requires only basic classroom equipment and maple samaras, which can be found throughout most of the United States or purchased online.
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This paper airplane lesson has been used with sixth-grade students to introduce scientific terms and concepts that students need to know before they design and conduct their own inquiry experiments. In addition to science concepts, mathematics skills are embedded in this lesson as students measure paper airplane flights to the nearest centimeter and calculate range, mode, and median in a hands-on way. The 5E model provides a way to organize inquiry-based instruction, and focuses on actively involving students in the learning process (Carin, Bass, and Contant 2005).
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The West Point Bridge Design (WPBD) building project engages students in project-based learning by giving them a real-life problem to solve. By using technology, students are able to become involved in solving problems that they normally would not encounter. Involvement with interactive websites, such as WPBD, assists students in using higher-level thinking skills and problem solving (NSTA 2006). It is important that we keep our students engaged in learning science, as the scientific society of tomorrow depends upon the science students of today.
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