Editor's Corner

This article discusses an innovative approach to science education focused on engaging students through authentic learning experiences and hands-on activities. It emphasizes the importance of linking classroom instruction with real-world science research practices, particularly in the context of coral reef ecosystems through an authentic learning opportunity. The article shares insights from piloting a coral reef ecosystem lesson with high school biology students, noting their enthusiastic engagement and skill development in data interpretation and communication. The lab activity is an opportunity for students to simulate underwater research techniques and analyze authentic data to assess the health of coral reef ecosystems. The article underscores the urgency of educating students about threats facing coral reefs, including climate change, pollution, and human activities. Whether we live near an ocean or far away it is important to help students understand how the ocean is connected to our daily lives. By integrating ocean literacy principles into the curriculum, educators can empower students to understand the interconnectedness of marine ecosystems and human behaviors, encouraging informed citizenship and environmental stewardship. This article advocates for transformative science education that cultivates critical thinking, scientific inquiry, and a deeper appreciation for the natural world.

Student activities based on deposition in a beaker introduce Walther’s Law, which states that, if uninterrupted, vertical deposition is duplicated in the horizontal. When gravel, sand, and clay (mud) are stirred in a beaker of water, they settle out predictably. The heaviest (gravel) deposits first, then sand, and, finally, clay. This is Walther’s Law in the vertical. The same sequence is seen in streams flowing into the sea. Gravel settles out first, followed by sand and clay. This is Walther’s Law in the horizontal. Activities in this article use Walther’s Law to introduce high school Earth-science students to stream deposition, shifting shorelines, and regional deposition.

Socioscientific issues (SSIs) can help students think about the moral and ethical issues related to science. When SSI issues are based on local phenomena and issues within students’ communities, they can also resonate more with students. This article uses the SSI of tilling to help students understand the pros and cons of this farming practice, but also helps us teach some basic soil principles such as light absorption based on soil coverage, permeability in compact vs non-compact soil samples, wind erosion, water erosion, and the concept of buffers (partially addressing HS-ESS3-4 and HS-ESS2-5).

Pendulum paintings are fun to make and fascinating to observe in process, but they can be used to model real scientific analysis using messy data. In this activity, students create pendulum paintings and develop an analysis using measurements of multiple variables to try to create a mathematical model that will predict the amount of time for the pendulum to stop. Through this analysis of messy data, students expand their critical thinking skills in an attempt to model a complex system. This mirrors what scientists do in the actual study of complex systems such as weather or ecosystems. Additionally, students may see mathematic functions and equations through a different lens as models of real systems, reducing math-related anxiety and promoting mathematical thinking.

Media has always played a significant role in shaping education. Visual cues and observable phenomena brought to life on screens or through vivid and engrossing sound effects make science accessible to people in ways that textbooks, journals and technical reports cannot. With the release of blockbuster films that tackle complex subjects, the science education community gets a chance to revisit how the story of science is told. This commentary considers how two blockbuster movies might be used to discuss how to teach science-technology-society topics in secondary classrooms. The NSTA Position Statements will also be examined in the context of science storytelling through popular media.

Local landscapes examined via Google Earth provide a natural arena on which students can analyze how humans modify and interact with their environment. These lessons guide students through an exploration of the natural and built environments both near and far so students begin to understand how each of these environments compare and the role they play in our everyday lives. With this knowledge, students progress from natural and built environments to the concept of land cover classification, a system of dividing out land cover into categories that describe its use and impact. The students then move toward examining the natural and built environment and each land cover classification in terms of environmental justice themes with the specific example of soil pollution. In each of these lessons, students are encouraged to examine a variety of categories and scales that their surrounding environment can be divided into to determine how we interact with the world and the results of those interactions.

In this unit, students explore the phylogeography of three-toed sloths (Bradypus pygmaeus and Bradypus variegatus) endemic to the Bocas del Toro islands off the Caribbean coast of Panama. After learning about the geologic history of this region, students measure model sloth skulls from each of the islands and compile that data into scatterplots. Students then analyze the scatterplots to make conclusions about which geographic factors best account for the variance in sloth body size in the region. The sequence of activities was designed for high school life science classrooms using the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) framework and teaches the disciplinary core idea LS3.B Variation of Traits. This lesson was taught in an integrated co-teaching classroom, a special education classroom, and a ninth-grade general biology classroom. Students were able to successfully answer the overarching research question and gained a deeper knowledge about natural selection and evolution in the process.

Global education presents an opportunity for all classroom teachers, regardless of subject or grade level, to engage students in understanding globally relevant issues that extend from content taught in class and providing opportunities for students to develop solutions and enact strategies in addressing these issues. These issues are embodied within the Sustainable Development Goals – a series of 17 goals established by the United Nations that collectively work toward providing an opportunity for all global citizens to survive and prosper today and for generations to follow. This paper describes strategies for STEM teachers to integrate global education within their classroom and empower their students to solve real-world problems experienced in the global community.

Crosscutting concepts (CCCs) are designed to help students make sense of phenomena across multiple scientific disciplines (National Research Council 2012). Since they are applicable to explaining so many different phenomena, they have the potential to be accessible, extensible, and generative for sensemaking. We suggest that explicitly using CCCs during the can serve as a resource for students to help them begin to make sense of phenomena without in-depth content knowledge (Krajcik & Reiser 2021). But how could we get students to use CCCs productively, when they have not yet begun to dig into the phenomena enough to develop the deep disciplinary knowledge necessary to explain it? We explore an instructional approach that scaffolds students' use of CCCs and helps students use them to make sense of and ask productive questions about an anchoring phenomenon. We describe how CCCs play a role in working with anchoring phenomena to guide sensemaking in a unit, and present evidence from 32 classrooms that illustrates how students use CCCs as part of their sensemaking to develop productive investigative questions. These data were used to revise lessons through incorporation of scaffolds to support students' use of CCCs as part of their sensemaking around the anchoring phenomena.