All Resources

Journal Article

Customized Internet Assessments

Online assessments, one area of Internet technology that educators are still trying to develop, can involve complicated programming beyond the reach of many instructors. This article describes a program that enables instructors to create their own on...

Journal Article

Building Energy Efficiency: Energy auditing allows students to work with the community and learn new technology

The author developed a project-based curriculum called the "EnergyNet Energy Audit Project," to teach students about energy. Students look for wasted energy—energy being consumed without benefit to people—in a building and find ways to reduce th...

Journal Article

Teaching Effective Scientific Writing

In an extension of the preceding article, which describes a Towson University course that teaches students to analyze scientific information, this article summarizes the guidelines necessary for students to follow to improve their writing and offers ...

Journal Article

A Beach in Your Classroom

Combining biology, geology, mathematics, geography, and language arts, this activity encourages students to use the scientific method to solve a realistic problem encountered by a fictional field paleontologist. Students learn about the principles of...

Journal Article

Our Growing Planet

Children are naturally curious and passionate about taking care of the world around them. To capitalize on these interests, the unit described in this article was the result of a schoolwide theme entitled People and the Planet (Wasserman 1996). The u...

Journal Article

Integrating Pharmacology into the Organic Chemistry Course

Many nonchemistry majors are unaware of the unity between chemistry and biology and tend to separate the two disciplines conceptually. In a course designed to emphasize health-related issues using a pharmacological approach, students gained a much be...

Journal Article

Analyzing and Communicating Scientific Information

Using collaborative techniques, case studies, and extensive assessment, students in the Towson Transition Course at Towson University learned to access, evaluate, and communicate scientific information. A statistically significant increase in the ave...

Journal Article

Students See the Light: Investigating luminescence and incandescence through a three-part learning cycle

The difference between luminescence and incandescence seem simple enough concepts to teach. But to help students develop conceptual understanding, this article features activities from PRISMS (Physics Resources and Instructional Strategies for Motiva...

Journal Article

Idea Bank: Tips and techniques for creative teaching

The Idea Bank provides tips and techniques for creative teaching, in about 1,000 words. This month’s Idea Bank features creative teaching techniques for introducing students to the vast amount of knowledge in the periodic table of elements and an a...

Journal Article

Reflections on Earth—Remote-Sensing Research from Your Classroom

The Smithsonian Institution, with support from Honda, has developed a program entitled Reflections on Earth to provide resources for remote-sensing education. Through this program, teachers and students have access to basic information and instructio...

Journal Article

The Acadian Dikes

Technology permeates today’s society, but history also contains rich examples of technology as “a way of adapting.” The Egyptians’ approach to building pyramids, the construction of the Great Wall of China; world-wide canal systems; the desig...

Journal Article

Online Concept Maps: Enhancing collaborative learning by using technology with concept maps

In the early 1990s, the University of West Florida and IBM Latin America investigated establishing telecommunication links among schools. This arrangement—Project Quorum—included public and private schools throughout Latin America from Chile to M...

Journal Article

Adding Math to Biology: Teaching the mathematical basis of evolutionary biology

Without a mathematical understanding of evolutionary theory, we leave students defenseless against shallow arguments and pseudoscience. In this activity, students study normal variation in coral size, and to do the exercise teachers only need relativ...

Journal Article

Examining Language To Capture Scientific Understandings: The Case of the Water Cycle

As teachers of science, we need to keep in mind that thought and language are intricately related. Linguistic approximations, errors, and misses may be useful windows into our children’s developing thoughts and conceptions. Fostering more different...