Egg, larva, pupa, adult, done! How easy it would be if teaching students to grasp the nature and role of change was that simple! Getting students to observe and attend to the changes around them—in their natural surroundings and in the laboratory—is not a simple task. Change is not a “once and done” topic; it must be a conceptual thread that is continuously woven in all topics in science. Students must examine both long and short-term changes; the evolution of butterflies as well as their metamorphosis, plate tectonics as well as overnight storm erosion, climate change as well as the changeability of daily weather. This collection of articles will help you weave threads of change into your specific science content.
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Students of all ages get a thrill out of actually seeing clumps or strands of DNA. The Biotechnology/Bioinformatics Discovery! Project, a professional development workshop offered to science teachers, has always included a DNA-extraction activity. Over the course of four years, as the authors conducted these workshops for scores of teachers, they extended and refined the DNA-extraction activity to make it relevant to middle school students. Although the protocol for this exercise is on their project website along with teaching tips, they describe here the use of oral directions to give teachers many opportunities to interact with their students, and to assess how well students can follow directions and stay focused on the task.
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Students connect to science in multiple ways. For some students, learning how real people have developed and defended their scientific ideas makes science relevant and interesting. Tracking the changes in scientific thought over time can be fascinating for students as they see how scientists based their growing understanding on empirical data that became more extensive with each new wave of technology. Students also discover that the process of accepting new explanations is often fraught with controversy. In this interdisciplinary activity, students develop a timeline that uses posters to show how scientists’ explanations of our solar system and the universe have changed over time.
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Many teachers fall into the pattern of “assumptive teaching” (Herber 1970), assuming that other instructors will teach students the important strategies they need for learning. In this case, tools and strategies may not be taught outside of reading or language arts because a science teacher can say, “It’s not my job.” However, a sixth-grade team decided to make it their jobs. With the help of university researchers, they employed three reading-to-learn strategies in their content areas as a routine instructional strategy to help students become expert readers. In this article, they summarize their work using one particular science lesson as an example. This snapshot demonstrates how the reading-to-learn strategies are used in the service of learning science content.
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Helping students understand how to learn is an important goal for all subjects and levels of education. While this goal is highly regarded, promoting it is extremely difficult. Many times, we as teachers are consumed with how to better help our students understand the content and forget to draw their attention to how they came to understand a particular phenomenon. This article provides a concrete experience that will help students better understand what causes the phases of the Moon seen from Earth, and also explains how we can help students develop their understanding of how to learn. Although it doesn’t address all that is known about learning, it does provide some major implications for learning.
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While hiking a local conservation property and trying to unwind after a hectic day, it dawned on the author that teaching his students about slow changes to the Earth’s surface could be as simple as a walk in the woods. Decaying stumps, ATV tracks, stone walls, and crumbling outcrops were all evidence that nature and humans were altering the Earth’s surface. After talking about these ideas with his sixth-grade teaching team, they decided to plan a field trip to two local land trust properties where students would document change in action. Here he shares the details of their exciting and inquiry-based excursion.
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Estimation is an important skill that we all use every day, often without realizing it. It might not seem very scientific, because we think of science as being accurate and precise—surely estimating is just a form of guessing. It seems unpredictable and unreliable, but actually, many scientists use estimation in their work. In many cases, things could be measured or counted accurately, but sometimes it is simply more practical to estimate because collecting accurate results would be too time-consuming and too difficult. This is the value of estimation. The following exercises are fun and interesting ways of teaching estimation.
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Duke Farms and Gardens, a 2,700-acre estate in Hillsborough, New Jersey, that includes a large greenhouse, was the site of a middle school field trip that provided the opportunity to highlight overlapping science and visual art curricula goals. Some of the classroom activities that students engaged in before and after returning from the field trip included creating three-dimensional terrariums with living plants, rocks, and earth, and sketching, drawing, painting, and making prints of the contents of the discrete greenhouse gardens.
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The list from the nurse’s office of students with known allergies seems to get longer each year. Allergy symptoms can range from a simple red rash or itch to life-threatening anaphylactic shock. Interestingly enough, peanuts and tree nuts account for approximately 92% of severe and fatal reactions. Because allergies can be a real challenge both academically and legally for the administration and science teacher, they need to develop a plan that involves students and their families to minimize risks. This month's column outlines the responsibilities of parents, guardians, students, administrators, and science teachers.
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This year marks the 400th anniversary of when a telescope was used for astronomical observations, and 2009 has also been designated the International Year of Astronomy—a yearlong celebration of astronomy through various events and activities both online and in the real world. These include the GLOBE at Night star count program; 100 Hours of Astronomy; Astronomy Day; and Space Week. In this month’s column, you’ll discover ways to bring this exciting event into your orbit!
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Is Earth unique in the universe? What is a habitable planet? How abundant are habitable planets? NASA’s Kepler Mission team seeks answers to these questions. Launching in 2009, Kepler is NASA’s first mission capable of finding Earth-sized and smaller planets in the habitable zone of other stars in our galaxy. This space mission offers an intriguing context for teaching and learning science concepts that support the National Science Education Standards in “Earth and Space Sciences” and “Science as Inquiry.” These activities include building models, positing explanations, understanding our solar system and extending that knowledge to other planetary systems, interpreting graphical data, and applying mathematics to analyze science data.
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Clarifying ancient environments millions of years ago is necessary to better understand how ecosystems change over time, providing insight as to the potential impacts of current global warming. This module engages middle school students in the scientific process, asking them to use tooth measurement to test the null hypothesis that horse and tapir diets have not changed over time. Based on their tooth study, students are then asked to make a new hypothesis regarding the diets of these animals, testing their second hypothesis with dental microwear data. Students utilize multiple learning styles during their paleontology research projects, ultimately making scientific illustrations based on their analysis of the quantitative data.
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Through a project funded by the National Science Foundation, Horizon Research has been developing assessment items for students (in the process, compiling item-writing principles from several sources and adding their own). In this article, the authors share what they have learned about writing items that reveal student understanding, including best practices and concrete examples of applying them. Although most of the examples given are multiple-choice items, the principles are generally applicable to open-ended questions as well.
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At Daniell Middle School in Marietta Georgia, students’ interest in science and understanding of matter has been magnified. This is due, at least in part, to science faculty, who are convinced that a hands-on, inquiry approach to science can stimulate student excitement, promote concept acquisition, and build a deeper understanding of science. During a recent eighth-grade physical science class, students utilized molecular models in order to explore the similarities and differences between physical and chemical changes. This engaging and hands-on lesson is described in this article.
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