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Book Chapter
This simple but engaging activity about texture is for students in grades K–4. Textures are all around us, and they are important to our everyday activities—consider a piece of sandpaper, a cheese grater, or the soles of your shoes. As students b...
Book Chapter
Investigating the Properties of Magnets
In this activity, younger students encounter, discuss, and apply the basic characteristics of magnets and magnetism as they explore and elaborate on their experiences. Student groups implement some of the terminology and concepts appropriate to the s...
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Applying Simple Chromatography
This activity involves chemistry, mystery, colors, and measurement. Students observe the composition of various inks by separating them via water-based chromatography. Students use what they learn about chromatography to solve a mystery involving a s...
Book Chapter
Investigating Surface Tension and Soap
You students encounter soap and water every day and the activity in this chapter helps them learn something new about both substances. Students find out why water can actually overfill a cup without spilling and why soap makes dust or dirt particles ...
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Learning About Acids and Bases
The chemistry of acids and bases is a fundamental area of study in the physical sciences. The following activity is really two exercises in one. First, students learn to distinguish between acids and bases using various color-changing indicator solut...
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For this Earth science investigation, students examine the composition of soil samples taken from three different depths at the same location. Students answer questions such as “How do the three samples compare? How does the soil feel? Look? Smell?...
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In this activity, students examine garden variety rocks, classifying them based on observable properties. This lesson teaches students not only about rocks but also about how to take a closer look at objects and materials that they encounter every da...
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Students learn what evaporation is and how various factors—time, heat, surface area, and wind—affect it. They also discover that water does not always evaporate at the same rate and saltwater leaves something behind when it evaporates. Finally, s...
Book Chapter
Examining Colors, Color Perception, and Sight
Students of all ages are fascinated by color and how we perceive it. For the main activity in this chapter, your class explores colors and visual perception by mixing colors in several ways. Students learn more about colors, light, vision, and color ...
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Exploring the Mysteries of Fingerprints
This activity combines a variety of processes and skills into an investigation of something near and dear to your students—their fingers. Math and science blend seamlessly as students observe, compare, and apply their ideas about fingerprints....
Book Chapter
Making Prints From Fruits and Vegetables
Students may be familiar with eating fruits and vegetables, but have they ever taken a really close look at the anatomy of those specimens? In this activity, students have an opportunity to explore aspects of the internal and external anatomy of prod...
Book Chapter
What Do You See? Visual Observation
The famous New York Yankee catcher Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” This activity helps strengthen students’ skills in a fundamental aspect of mathematics and science: visual observation. Students carefully examin...
Book Chapter
Examining Serial Sections of an Apple
In this activity, students make serial sections of an apple. Students make cross-section prints of the top portion of the apple, then another print further into the apple, and so on until they get to the bottom of the apple. This serial sectioning te...
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Science and Math on Television
Students certainly enjoy watching television, and they traditionally favor shows about science, mathematics, and technology. Consider the popularity of MythBusters, Bill Nye the Science Guy, National Geographic Explorer, and, of course, the old favor...
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A One-Sided Paper Loop—The Möbius Band
What can you make from a sheet of paper that has only one side, where inside equals outside? The answer is a Möbius band, of course, the one-sided paper loop. In this activity, students in grades 3 and 4 explore a mathematical conundrum: How do we d...
Book Chapter
Students constantly notice the world around them, and to help make sense of it all, they attempt to group and categorize objects and experiences they encounter. In science, the study of classification is referred to as taxonomy. To make this subject ...
Book Chapter
Your Very Own Museum—Making Collections
Much more than childish pastimes, collections form the basis for museums of natural history, found object art projects, and personal hobbies. Furthermore, many notable scientists—Charles Darwin, for example—began their lifelong investigations wit...
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Creating Art Projects From Recycled Materials
Why not challenge students to design a collage, mosaic, or shadowbox entirely from “found objects”—recycled, natural, and discarded materials? The aesthetic nature of the art of salvage connects students not only to ancient, creative roots, but...
Book Chapter
Experimenting With Force and Motion Using Origami Frogs
Objects in motion and the forces that move them are the subjects of this lesson. This practical series of activities offers students a dynamic understanding of Newton’s three laws of motion. In particular, the third law is investigated as students ...
Book Chapter
Everyday Conceptions Across the World
In the initial phases of the process of developing items for the PISA 2006 assessment of scientific literacy, efforts were made to develop a smaller number of units called focus units. In addition to contributing to the measures of scientific literac...
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A Perspective on U.S. Science Teaching and Learning
This chapter presents a sketch on how PISA 2006 assessed conditions of teaching and learning in science classrooms. With selected findings from PISA 2006, similarities and differences are shown between approaches taken toward science teaching and lea...
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Improving Science Teaching and Learning
In this chapter, attention is drawn to the issue of quality instruction and level of student achievement. The chapter begins with a review of the findings of the McKinsey report (Barber and Mourshed 2007) about the importance of providing effective i...
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Windows Into High-Achieving Science Classrooms
For most science teachers, the vision of science instruction has been limited to what transpires in their own classrooms and possibly those of a few select colleagues. Rarely do they have the opportunity to examine learning environments outside their...
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The Importance of Aligning Teaching and Assessment
This chapter focuses on the relation that is desirable between assessment and teaching activities in order to keep coherence with teaching goals and help all students to understand this coherence. The PISA 2006 assessment is discussed with respect to...
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PISA 2006 Assessment of Attitudes Toward Science
Science teachers want students to develop interest in science and value in learning science. Attitudes toward science play an important role in students' decisions to develop their science knowledge, pursue careers in science, and use scientific conc...
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What Science Do Students Want to Learn
A major innovation in PISA 2006 was that many of the science units contained one or two questions designed to assess students' attitudes toward science—in particular, students’ interest in learning about specific science topics. In addition, the ...
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Teaching and Learning Science: PISA and the TIMSS Video Study
Scientific literacy was the main focus of PISA in 2006, and a number of items on the student questionnaire asked students how frequently they experienced certain teaching and learning activities, or teaching styles, in their science classrooms. This ...
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Seeing the U.S. Education System Through the Prism of PISA
For some countries, results from PISA have been disappointing but at the same time, PISA also shows that strong performance, and improvement, is possible. Many countries display strong overall performance while some countries show that success can be...
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Teaching Science to Achieve Scientific Literacy
Historically, the study of the sciences as part of schooling was first introduced in the senior or last years of secondary schooling for the express purpose of assisting those students who wished to embark on science-based courses of study at the uni...
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PISA 2006: An Assessment Framework for Scientific Literacy
The PISA 2006 definition of scientific literacy had its origin in the consideration of what 15-year old students should know, value, and be able to do as a preparedness for life in modern society. The results of PISA Science 2006 provide important in...
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Designing a Science Curriculum to Enhance Students' Scientific Literacy
Over the past two decades or so, the term scientific literacy has become prominent in discussions of the school science curriculum and proposals for improving it. If improving students' scientific literacy is to become the central aim of the school s...
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Assessing PISA 2006 Scientific Competencies
This chapter begins by considering what is meant by scientific literacy and how the PISA 2006 scientific competencies encompass basic components of scientific literacy. Then it describes some examples of how these competencies are assessed in PISA 20...
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Scientific Literacy: Implications of PISA Science 2006 for Teachers and Teaching
In the first part of this chapter, the authors briefly review the notion of scientific literacy, emphasize its central focus in the PISA 2006 survey, highlight the overall test performance of countries and students, and make some observations about t...
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PISA 2006: Test Development and Design
In PISA 2006 three subject domains were tested, with science being the major domain for the first time in a PISA survey and reading and mathematics being minor domains. This chapter first describes the process by which the PISA consortium, led by the...
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PISA: Frequently Answered Criticisms
Studies such as PISA are routinely criticized by educational commentators—particularly when the results are not consistent with their preconceived ideas about the relative merits and efficiencies of various educational practices and systems. This c...
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PISA Science 2006: International Results
Throughout the world education authorities want to know the capacities that their students develop during their formative years in schools. They want to know to what extent students have learned fundamental scientific concept and theories and how wel...
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Knowledge of and About Science
An intuitive and common sense understanding of a science assessment would be that it aims at measuring students' knowledge of and about science. The aim of PISA is to assess to what degree students can apply their knowledge in contexts of relevance t...
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What Scientific Knowledge Remains When the Rest is Forgotten?
The PISA 2006 definition of scientific literacy encompasses three competencies—identifying scientific issues, explaining phenomena scientifically, and using scientific evidence. The results for scientific literacy show clearly that some countries h...
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What Lies Behind Finnish Students' Success in PISA Science?
Finnish students' performance in the PISA scientific literacy assessment has been excellent, and even improved between the three-year cycles of PISA measurements. It is not easy to explain the good results, but this chapter focuses on several factors...
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Overcoming Challenges and Succeeding in PISA Science 2006
Despite the absence of a national science curriculum and the inevitable differences in science curriculum across Canada, Canadian students ranked third in the world on the PISA 2006 science assessment. This chapter presents three possible explanation...