The Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology Program provides teachers and students with the opportunity and materials to participate in regionally focused ecological studies under the guidance of a mentor scientist working on a similar study. The Harvard Forest is part of a national network of ecological research sites known as the Long Term Ecological Research Network (LTER). The study protocols it offers are inquiry-based and incorporate science education best practices. This article describes how this program was utilized to embark fifth graders on a hunt for an invasive species while conducting authentic research.
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Most children enjoy being in gardens. To capitalize on this interest, the authors designed a pea project in which second- and third-grade students would discover how plants grow under different conditions while also developing observation and nonfiction writing skills. As a result of this inquiry-based project, students learned how to think and act like scientists.
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The importance of developing the abilities to conduct and understand inquiry cannot be overstated. Acquisition of inquiry strategies will prepare students to encounter and solve problems and questions throughout their lives. By developing a more complete understanding of inquiry, it will be possible to infuse it throughout the curriculum and begin building a repertoire of strategies and content-based lessons. We hope the 2010–2011 volume of Science and Children will become a valuable resource. With this issue, we begin a Year of Inquiry.
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This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer.
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In an activity sequence that took place over several days, the class learned about sound and how people hear sounds. Following each activity, students engaged in whole-group sharing sessions and individual journal-writing sessions that were designed to help them see the patterns that emerged from their explorations. The activities were carefully chosen to illustrate these patterns using the Experiences-Patterns-Explanations (EPE) model of science. In this article, the author describes how EPE can be used to help students connect explanations to patterns in experiences.
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The “Doing Science” probe from Uncovering Student Ideas in Science: Another 25 Formative Assessment Probes (Keeley, Eberle, and Dorsey 2008) can reveal some surprising ideas your students have about how scientists do their work. In order to build conceptual understanding that leads to a deep appreciation of the way science is practiced, you must start by uncovering the preconceived ideas your students bring to the science classroom. The “Doing Science” probe is designed to elicit commonly held ideas students have about the way scientists go about their investigations.
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If our classroom instruction is to truly reflect what scientists do, it is important to put students in situations in which they are expected to ask questions about the natural world, design investigations to answer these questions, collect data, and draw conclusions based on their analysis of the data. Organizing instruction in this manner is often described as using an inquiry-oriented teaching approach. Through such a teaching approach, students will come to understand what scientists do.
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Science Friday’s motto “Making Science User-Friendly” was the authors’ inspiration, as was its format for a segment on the morning broadcast at Forest View Elementary School. Patterned after National Public Radio’s Science Friday, this special feature was designed to provide an opportunity for budding scientists to communicate their discoveries to the entire school community. It features student scientists who share their research, observations, class projects, experiments, and natural history collections.
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The time is right for an emphasis on imagination and innovativeness in science education, both in students and in teachers. Change now dominates our economy and culture, and can only be realized through imagination and creativeness. Therefore, our new NSTA president has adopted “Imagine and Invent: Create a Great Future” as his theme for this year. His message discusses the relevance of this theme to the increasingly complex work environments of the 21st century as well as his other presidential goals for the year.
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One way to help elementary students see connections more easily and to make their thinking more visible is to teach them to approach scientific investigation and problem solving as scientists do—from the framework of “finding evidence to support claims.” In this article, the authors begin by introducing students to the concept of evidence, then build on that idea by introducing the concepts of cause and effect and the need for accuracy in evidence (i.e., measurement), and finally by introducing the ideas of variables and control in an investigation.
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In this article, a science teacher from the Midwest reflects on her summer vacation to the Gulf of Mexico. She felt that this vacation would help improve her teaching about the environmental problems in the gulf and elsewhere. After all, anyone can show photos of oil-laden birds and dead sea turtles and read news clips of a distant place, but to tell her students she had seen those things firsthand would mean more. Deeply affected by this experience, she plans to include more teaching about alternative energy sources, including risk assessments, in the coming school year.
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Unless they are biting us—or wowing us in some way—insects are often overlooked, despite vastly outnumbering us and being vital to our existence. Fortunately, there are many ways to focus the curiosity of children about insects and get some quality outside time. Let these projects guide your students into the world of insects as they learn about pollination and the astounding diversity of insects. When students gain identification skills and begin monitoring insect species and reporting data, they are performing authentic research for scientists—and learning to function as scientists as well.
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Using an adapted version of a recently published scientific article, a group of sixth graders worked together identifying conclusions, deciding on appropriate evidence, suggesting improvements for the study, and recommending further investigations for scientists. This experience provided opportunities for these students to use reading to decide on the quality of a scientific study—just like scientists do when they read.
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Insect vision is both simple and complex. It’s simple in that insects can’t focus and generally see a blur. It’s complex in that insects are very good at detecting motion, they can see in almost any direction, they can use polarized ultraviolet light from the sky to navigate, and they can use ultraviolet light reflected from flowers to keep that “birds and bees” thing going.
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How can a teacher simultaneously teach science concepts through inquiry while helping students learn about the nature of science? After pondering this question in their own teaching, the authors developed a 5E learning cycle lesson (Bybee et al. 2006) that concurrently embeds opportunities for fourth-grade students to (a) learn a science concept, (b) develop an inquiry skill, and (c) learn about scientific inquiry (an aspect of the nature of science). This approach has been found to be particularly useful to help students think like scientists.
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Paleontologists, scientists who study the history of life on Earth, work in a dynamic area of science. Think of putting together a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing—that’s what creating the fossil record is like. Each time a new piece is discovered; ideas about the whole picture become clearer (and sometimes even change considerably). This month’s column focuses on how we know what we know about prehistoric life, how scientists’ ideas have changed over time, and what mysteries of the past remain to be solved.
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Play and science inquiry are essential parts of early childhood programs. Imaginative play, unscripted yet guided by children’s own rules, allows students to use their imagination and develop self-regulation, symbolic thinking, memory, language, and social skills, as well as construct their knowledge and understanding of the world. Play can reflect what children learn while engaged in science inquiry. Like play, science inquiry helps children make sense of their world and appreciate the work of scientists.
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A fear of snakes developed into an opportunity to teach students about the process of science: formulating questions, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating findings to the public. By using snakes to help students “think like a scientist,” the authors engaged students in a five-day unit on inquiry while providing information about snakes found in their local community. As a result of this unit, students were encouraged to keep thinking like ssssscientists!
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Insect vision is an area of active research that allows fruitful exploration into the nature of the scientific endeavor because of the bias our own vision brings. As scientists, we use our senses to make observations, but we can’t assume that what we see is what insects see; we are forced to think outside of our own senses when we ask questions about insect vision. The authors considered these concepts as they guided a first- and second-grade integrated class in thinking about what scientists currently know about insect eyesight, the complex issues scientists face when trying to understand what insects see, and how students as scientists can begin to investigate eyesight.
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