Wouldn’t it be helpful to know what your students’ ideas are about a particular science concept before you launch into a new lesson? Reveal students’ preconceptions of fundamental concepts in science with NSTA Press’s award-winning and best-selling Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series. Each volume includes 25 short formative assessment probes that can help pinpoint what your students know (or think they know)—allowing you to monitor student learning and adjust your teaching strategies accordingly. The probes—which cover physical, life, Earth and space sciences, as well as nature of science and unifying themes—are invaluable formative assessment tools you can use either at the beginning of each topic or unit or as you progress through specific lessons. Volume 4 also includes a valuable discussion on balancing formative assessment with summative assessment.

Accompanying each probe are detailed teacher materials that review science content; make connections to National Science Education Standardsand Benchmarks; summarize relevant research on learning; and suggest instructional approaches for elementary, middle, and high school students.

Page Keeley is the senior science program director at the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance and a former NSTA president. Co-authors in the series are former NSTA Executive Director Francis Eberle, Chad Dorsey, Joyce Tugel, and Lynn Farrin, who serve as MMSA science specialists. Their mission is to develop, coordinate, and implement science education initiatives at the state and national levels. Combined they have more than 35 years of teaching experience in middle and high school science.

Page Keeley has teamed up with physicist and science educator Rand Harrington to write the first book in a new Uncovering series dedicated to physical science. They begin with one of the most challenging topics: force and motion.

Author Page Keeley expands her award-winning series to include the first book devoted exclusively to life science. Keeley addresses the topics of life and its diversity; structure and function; life processes and needs of living things; ecosystems and change; reproduction, life cycles, and heredity; and human biology.

NEW! Discover what your students know—or think they know—about what causes night and day, why days are shorter in winter, and how to tell a planet from a star. Page Keeley's 45 astronomy probes provide situations that will pique your students' interest while helping you understand how they think about key ideas related to the nature of planet Earth; the Sun–Earth system; modeling the Moon; dynamic solar system; and stars, galaxies, and the universe.