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Book Chapter
Building Ongoing and Sustained Professional Development
The East Tennessee State University Science Partnership (ETSUSP) is bringing about a restructuring of the system as it pertains to building and maintaining ongoing and sustained professional development in science teaching and learning at the middle ...
Book Chapter
Best Practices for Professional Development for the 21st Century
In order to support teacher quality in mathematics and science—powerful, content-specific staff development should be designed that is data-driven and evaluated, and is based on using ideas that work and knowing how educators learn. These themes pr...
Book Chapter
In this chapter, the author gives a general overview about evolution and its major themes—variation, inheritance, selection, and time. The author also takes a look at the basic principles by which evolution works, and considers how they have intera...
Book Chapter
This chapter gives specific background on the evolution of the seven organisms. The seven examples of evolution can be explored in the activities section of the book, as well as learning how scientists are discovering some of the evolutionary history...
Book Chapter
Teaching and Learning About Evolution
The National Association of Biology Teachers considers evolution to be the foundation for middle school life science. In the National Science Education Standards (NSES), evolution is an essential component of the science curriculum at all grade level...
Book Chapter
Viruses are tiny, but they pack a big punch. They spread and multiply fast, causing some of the most common and contagious diseases in the world. This chapter covers one of the deadliest viruses to emerge in recent years—Human Immunodeficiency (HIV...
Book Chapter
Diatoms (DIE-a-toms) are one of the most important things you never knew about. They are everywhere there is water. A drop of lake water is packed with them. You probably swallow millions every time you go swimming. These tiny, one-celled life forms ...
Book Chapter
Can a farm be the size of a walnut? It can if the farmer is an ant. Some of the world's smallest farmers are leaf-cutter ants. These six-legged farmers have amazed scientists by growing crops successfully for millions of years. What is the secret of ...
Book Chapter
Hawaiian Flies: Song & Dance Success
In this chapter, learn how over 800 kinds of flies have evolved from a single species of Drosophila that blew ashore on the remote islands of Hawaii. This is a group of flies found only on the Hawaiian Islands....
Book Chapter
Galàpagos Finches: Famous Beaks
The Galàpagos Islands are a cluster of extremely remote active volcanic islands in the Pacific Ocean. The Islands are home to 13 species of finches. In this chapter, learn how conducting fieldwork on Galàpagos finches has caused scientists to rethi...
Book Chapter
Humans & Chimps: All in the Family
No one would mistake you for a chimpanzee. As for humans, there is no one like us on Earth, right? Wrong, scientists were surprised to learn from DNA studies that humans are genetically very similar to chimps. This chapter compares the DNA of humans ...
Book Chapter
Whales with knees and toes? Incredible as it seems, whales once walked on legs and lived on land. Millions of years of biological change have erased the whale's legs from its body, but a faint trace remains. Hidden inside the streamlined body of many...
Book Chapter
A person, place, or thing is what usually sparks those first memorable childhood impressions. Of course, we often do not study our newfound interests from the time of our personal enlightenment to adulthood, but early childhood interests are strong a...
Book Chapter
In this chapter, leaving light behind you enter the world of slow-moving mollusks. A snail must get from one corner of a room (dimensions 5 m × 10 m × 15 m) to the diagonally opposite corner in the least time. The snail can walk on any of the four...
Book Chapter
The September 1991 discovery of a frozen body in the Tirolean Alps revived interest in radiocarbon dating. This chapter is based on this discovery, assuming you have an isolated 1-g sample of carbon from a frozen animal and that the atmospheric ratio...