“Are you teaching today or are the students just doing a lab or taking a test?” I used to dread this question from a former principal when he wanted to observe a class. He was implying that the only classroom activity worth observing was when I was lecturing (which did not happen very often) or leading a large group activity. But I fooled him! One time I asked him to observe during a performance assessment. To his credit, he came to appreciate that the most important thing that happens in the classroom is not just the teacher’s performance, but rather what the students are learning.
And how do we know what the students are learning? We can wait until the yearly state exams (assuming that science is one of them), we can give our own final or end-of-course exam, or we can create/use unit tests. These summative assessments are fine, but they don’t tell us which students are having problems or have developed misconceptions during the course or unit. And by then it could be too late to go back and reteach. Formative assessments, on the other hand, can provide “just-in-time” information on what students know or can do. These include traditional quizzes and assignments, but can also include informal “thumbs up” questions, journal entries, or bell-ringer activities.
Many students see assessments (or “tests” as we used to call them) as something that happens to them in order for teachers to assign grade at the end of a marking period. Perhaps we haven’t done a very good job of identifying the purposes of assessment. In his research on effective instruction, Robert Marzano found that setting goals and providing feedback to be essential. Another issue in student learning is the type of feedback we provide on assessment tasks. If all the students see are red checkmarks, circles around words that are misspelled, and a “grade” at the top of the page, it’s no wonder that they crumple the paper or stuff it into a notebook without paying much attention to it. If you would like more information on what informative feedback looks like, an article in the December/January Educational Leadership has a great article on “Feedback That Fits.”
Rubrics are another way to provide useful feedback to students. This month’s issue of Science Scope has examples of rubrics to use for student presentations and student writing. Going to the SciLinks site and searching on the keyword “assessment” leads to a set of websites. Many of these relate to reading and writing in science, but there are some great resources on rubrics:

• Ideas and Rubrics is provided by the Chicago Public Schools with examples and ideas.
• Formative Assessment Probes from a 2005 issue of Science Scope.
• Rubric Generator has lots of suggestions for rubrics that can be adapted.

A site that science teachers should take a serious look at is PALS (Performance Assessment Links in Science). There are dozens of performance assessment tasks, organized by standard, grade level, and topic. Each one references one or more of the National Science Education Standards (yes, every state has its own science standards, but many of these can be found in a paraphrased version in the NSES documents). Each assessment includes a detailed description for the teacher, a student handout with places to record data and observations, a scoring rubric, and the results of any formal validation. But the best part is there are examples of actual student work at each of the rubric levels. Wouldn’t it be interesting for a department or grade level to choose several of these to use throughout the year to assess (and discuss) student performance? And they’re already created for you to use! The November issue of the Science Teacher and the November 26 blog have resources for starting and using study groups. Students can use this reflecive process, too. The article “Reflecting on the Test” describes some strategies for helping students become co-owners of the learning process. At first, my students were not receptive to this type of self-reflection. After all, this put some responsibility back on them. I had to do a lot of modeling and be persistent, but in order for students to become lifelong learners, they cannot always depend on a teacher for feedback.
As a sidebar, if you’re not familiar with WebQuests, such as described in the article “Cell City WebQuest,” take a look at the WebQuest site from San Diego State University, where the concept originated. You can search their database by grade and subject, or you can get started on creating one of your own. Each of these has an assessment component, including a rubric.

Inquiry is not as dependent on equipment and technology as it is on the willingness of the teacher to model the process and to move from being a sage on the stage to be a guide on the side (or better yet – a partner in the process). What I find really interesting month after month in this journal is that the inquiry activities in the articles were actually conducted in real classrooms with real students — from young children exploring mixtures and elasticity to upper elementary students using satellite data to study local wetlands. The authors of these articles aren’t afraid of noting any unforeseen difficulties and the improvements they would make to the activity. On a practical note, I also liked how some of the articles list the related standards and have full-page resources (lesson outlines, student handouts) that could be used right away or saved for future lessons.
As you’re reading the articles, log into SciLinks and do a keyword search on “properties” or “matter” for websites that are related to this topic.
Two of these articles should be read together: “Button Basics” and “Science 101: Why Do We Classify Things in Science.” The first article describes an engaging classroom activity in classifying objects. When I did activities such as these with my students, I found the most interesting part was not the final chart or diagram but the conversations the students had during the process, the rationale they used in their classification schemes, and how they responded when another group used a different classification scheme for the same objects. The author of the Science 101 article notes that classification is not just an end in itself, but rather a process that is a means to an end – understanding concepts better. For example, in the “Case of the Missing Music” article, students don’t just classify fingerprints; they match the properties of fingerprints to solve a mystery. If you’re interested in other forensic activities, log into SciLinks and do a keyword search on “forensics”.
I hope that the readers of NSTA journals consider the Elementary-Middle School–High School classification as a fluid one! NSTA members have online access to all of the journals, and a quick browsing of the annotated table of contents can lead to ideas that can be adapted to other grade levels. For example, in this issue of S&C, the article “Mighty Molecule Models,” although used in fifth grade, could certainly be appropriate for secondary students, especially those who haven’t had much background in atoms and molecules. Regardless of the grade level, I think it’s important to keep guiding the students toward an understanding of what the models represent, as the authors of this article describe.
I could identify with the editor’s comment that some students were not familiar with the word “property” as it’s used in science. Sometimes we take this fundamental vocabulary for granted, thinking that the students understand how words such as “properties” and “theory” are used in science. I learned two new interpretations of words from this issue.

• In the article “Attracting Student Wonderings,” these wonderings (a term I had not seen in this context before) could be called guiding or essential questions – and they were formulated by first-graders!
• When I saw the title “Formative Assessment Probes – my first thought was that of electronic instruments. But the probes described here are processes to determine how students make connections between concepts, in this case the concepts of matter and rocks. The full-page probes can be downloaded, too.

Talk about an interesting day in the age of electronic information! This afternoon in a listserv I belong to, I read about a report by the National Academy of Sciences on the teaching of evolution in the classroom. There were two news articles, but I wanted to read the primary source. On the opening page of the National Academy of Sciences website, I found the news release from the Academy. It is in conjunction with the new book Science, Evolution, and Creationism. I followed that link and found out that I could download a PDF version of the book – for free! There was also a podcast. Guess what I’ll be reading/listening to over the weekend, and it all was available within a few minutes.
When I was teaching middle school science, evolution was in the district curriculum (and it is now in my state’s standards in biological sciences), and I can’t imagine teaching life science or biology without using evolution as an underlying principle. But as an undergraduate chemistry major, I never had the opportunity to formally study the theory of evolution. So my knowledge of evolution has accumulated from a variety of sources over the years.
Staying up-to-date on topics such as evolution is a lot easier with the Internet, but sometimes there is too much of a good thing. If you Google “evolution” for example, you get over 170,000,000 hits! Or — you could log into NSTA’s SciLinks, search on the word “evolution” and get a list of websites related to topics such as “biological evolution” or “evolution and adaptation.” Here are a few of my favorites.
Understanding Evolution is a comprehensive site from the University of California Museum of Paleontology. This could be the basis for a complete course, study group, or self-study. The teacher link in the right margin is a tremendous resource with a link to a searchable database of lesson ideas and a link called “conceptual framework” which is actually a set of essential questions around which to organize a unit! Many individual components of this site are noted separately in the SciLinks database, but if you go to the main site, you can see just how comprehensive it is. I would start with click on the Evolution 101 link for a tutorial on evolution. This would also be appropriate for students.
Another good source is Evolution from PBS. Even if you don’t have access to the video, the web-based resources are very good and visually stunning.
NSTA has a set of Evolution Resources,with links to the above websites as well as to position papers and other resources and articles.
I wonder how many people have actually read any of Darwin’s writing? Darwin’s The Origin of Species is not an easy read, but it is the primary source! The page has links to his other works, too.
A colleague of mine recently visited the Galapagos Islands and said it was a life-altering experience. I don’t know if I’ll ever get there, but Galapagos on the NSTA site is a great collection of background information, classroom investigations, and resources for teaching evolution.
If anyone else is reading the National Academy book, perhaps we could use this site to begin a discussion?

Mathematics and science seem like natural partners when designing interdisciplinary lessons or units. This issue of Science Scope has some suggestions for making these lessons authentic and purposeful, integrating science with geometry, scaling, graphing, and other mathematical concepts.
Along with this issue, you can review the October issue of Science and Children for more articles on this topic that have ideas that are appropriate or adaptable for middle school students. The blog posting for that issue describes an outstanding graphing website that is suitable for all ages.
For even more ideas for integrating mathematics and science, log into SciLinks and enter the code “SC120701” for a list of websites. I saw a few that looked particularly interesting:

• Planet Quest is a set of activities that involved measurement. This is a PDF document, so you can download it and use them offline. As a bonus, the activities are structured as cooperative learning activities, with a description of roles and expectations.
• Science is not the only subject in which research is conducted. The National Science Foundation has an overview of research in mathematics.
• Along with the activities in the article “Making and Measuring a Model of a Salt Marsh,” you could use the activities downloaded from Tidepool Math. These guide students through the processes of observation and estimation.

The “Issues In-Depth” article – Making Some Bones About It – is an excellent review of the skeletal system. Even though I’ve taught units on the skeletal system, it was an enjoyable read, and it’s important to keep our own content knowledge up-to-date. As a follow-up, go to the SciLinks site and enter “bones” or “muscles” as keywords to get lists of websites with more background information and classroom activities. You can also check out this month’s edition of The Science Teacher for an article that describes a classroom activity “Modeling Muscles.” This could easily be adapted for middle school students!