A life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool used by engineers to make measurements of net energy, greenhouse gas production, water consumption, and other items of concern. This article describes an activity designed to walk students through the qualitative part of an LCA. It asks them to consider the life-cycle costs of ethanol production, in terms of both energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions. In the process, they trace matter and energy through a complex fuel-production system.
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Broadcast engineers maintain radio stations—their job is to keep stations on the air and making money. From rewiring a station’s equipment to fixing a transmitter on a mountaintop at 3:00 a.m., these engineers make sure that we, the listeners, can count on music streaming from our favorite stations. As a teenager, Glenn Leffler never dreamed that his desire to be a musician would spark a career in broadcast engineering. Now—running a business, teaching classes at local colleges, and recording his own albums—he is grateful that his passion for guitar and gift for electronics paved the way.
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The end of the year is always a time for reflection. Although December may feel more like midyear for teachers, the end of the calendar year inevitably brings top 10 lists, reviews of the year’s best, and personal vows for improvement. But before you make those New Year’s resolutions, why not have a look back at The Science Teacher's (TST) 2010 year, and perhaps discover—or rediscover—an idea, activity, or teaching strategy that might be useful for your classes in 2011? While you’re at it, be sure to have a look at the significant changes we’ve made over the course of 2010—notably the introduction of three exciting new columns.
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What is the difference between an x-ray, a CAT scan, and an MRI?
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Thoughtful teachers allow students to pursue the relationship between structure and function before learning about particular organelles, usually through an analogy to a factory or some other complex system (Crooks and Sheldon 2005). In this Idea Bank, the author describes a similar approach, “The Invented Cell.” This activity helps students gain important insight into how biologists reason and moves the introduction to cellular biology beyond a collection of seemingly isolated facts about organelles.
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A major goal of education is to help learners store information in long-term memory and use that information on later occasions to effectively solve problems (Vockell 2010). Therefore, this author began to use the Rubik’s cube to help students learn to problem solve. There is something special about this colorful three-dimensional puzzle that seems to captivate the imagination of even the most lethargic student.
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Designing a new science laboratory or renovating an existing one can be an exciting experience. Though science teachers may have a better understanding of laboratory needs than most administrators, many schools tend to limit or exclude them from the planning process. What’s worse is that science teachers have to live with the mistakes, omissions, or inadequacies that result from misguided laboratory design. What should science teachers’ level of involvement be in the process of planning and building a new lab? This column describes their role each step of the way.
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Too often, students are not engaged in authentic questioning. Dan Meyer, a math educator, explains, “Our curricula are full of pseudoproblems wrapped in pseudocontext. We ask students to grapple with problems that only sort of resemble the real world, using a problem-solving process unknown outside of textbooks.” This month’s Science 2.0 column provides some ideas to initiate inquiry in your classroom.
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For scientists, the sandbox serves as an analog for faulting in Earth’s crust. Here, the large, slow processes within the crust can be scaled to the size of a table, and time scales are directly observable. This makes it a useful tool for demonstrating the role of inquiry in science. For this reason, the sandbox is also helpful for learning science through inquiry in middle and high school classrooms. This article describes a classroom version of the sandbox and how the authors use it as a physical model to promote inquiry in Earth science classes.
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You do not need to significantly change your curriculum to incorporate environmental topics. There are plenty of course-specific resources that can help you green your individual course content; or, if your whole science department is “on board,” you can green your curriculum together. Each department member can develop a course-specific unit that addresses an environmental issue and teaches course content. Or, the whole department can agree on one issue and have each course cover some part of it. This column provides a closer look at these two methods of greening your science department’s curriculum.
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The Hudson River Watershed contains a variety of geologic, topographic, climatic, and hydrologic features and a diversity of land-use patterns—making it an ideal model for studying human impact on the coastal environment. In this article, the authors present the Hudson River Plume (HRP), a problem-based online module that explores nonpoint-source pollution in the Hudson River ecosystem. The HRP is appropriate for use in high school biology and environmental, Earth, and marine science courses.
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Anecdotally, colleagues have shared that they spend anywhere from 3 to 10 hours a week on grading—depending on the time of year. When you add planning time to that, it’s easy to see how evenings and weekends can be quickly eaten up by paperwork. As a new teacher, be warned that a significant loss of personal time can add to the general stress of daytime teaching responsibilities—and quickly become overwhelming. This month’s column offers some useful tips to help you spend less time grading.
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Why does an athlete reach for a sports drink after a tough game or practice? The learning cycle presented in this article helps students answer this question. Learning cycles (Marek 2009) are designed to guide students through direct experiences with a particular concept. In this article, students learn about osmosis, or the moving of water into and out of cells through semipermeable membranes.
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As teachers, one of our most important responsibilities is to help students develop dynamic and useful views of science. Using current issues to create learning experiences can help generate student interest in science and help students appreciate its significance in both personal and societal contexts. This article presents a lesson based on news headlines related to the controversy of the reintroduction of gray wolves in Yellowstone National Park. In this jigsaw-style lesson plan, students grapple with important ecological content and learn to appreciate the diverse perspectives framing this debate.
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