JoinAll Resources
Journal Article
Insect vision is an area of active research that allows fruitful exploration into the nature of the scientific endeavor because of the bias our own vision brings. As scientists, we use our senses to make observations, but we can’t assume that what ...
Journal Article
Imagine entering a new classroom and finding your lab materials in complete disarray. Broken bits of metal and shards of glass mirrors are interspersed among live, unlabeled radioactive sources. Splintered metersticks and oily beakers lie amidst bead...
Journal Article
Science 2.0: GeoEverything—The Magic Carpet
Global Positioning System receivers (GPSr) are an indispensible classroom bridge between maps and the physical world as students go back and forth between projections and Earth. When using a GPSr, the spatial-relations skills students employ can help...
Journal Article
Message from the NSTA President: Imagine and Invent—Create a Great Future
The time is right for an emphasis on imagination and innovativeness in science education, both in students and in teachers. Change now dominates our economy and culture, and can only be realized through imagination and creativeness. Therefore, our ne...
Journal Article
Everyday Engineering: An absorbing look at terry-cloth towels
This article describes a lesson where students explore the absorbency of several towels with different weaves and weights. The lesson follows the 5E learning-cycle model and incorporates engineering in the sense of product testing with a focus on the...
Journal Article
The Early Years: Inquiry at Play
Play and science inquiry are essential parts of early childhood programs. Imaginative play, unscripted yet guided by children’s own rules, allows students to use their imagination and develop self-regulation, symbolic thinking, memory, language, an...
Journal Article
Thinking Like a Ssssscientist!
A fear of snakes developed into an opportunity to teach students about the process of science: formulating questions, collecting and analyzing data, and communicating findings to the public. By using snakes to help students “think like a scientist,...
Journal Article
In this article, a science teacher from the Midwest reflects on her summer vacation to the Gulf of Mexico. She felt that this vacation would help improve her teaching about the environmental problems in the gulf and elsewhere. After all, anyone can s...
Journal Article
The Monroe 2-Orleans BOCES is an organization that serves nine school districts west of Rochester, New York. One of the many programs provided by Monroe 2-Orleans BOCES is a regional summer school program that allows students to recover credit during...
Journal Article
Formative Assessment Probes: “Doing” Science
The “Doing Science” probe from Uncovering Student Ideas in Science: Another 25 Formative Assessment Probes (Keeley, Eberle, and Dorsey 2008) can reveal some surprising ideas your students have about how scientists do their work. In order to build...
Journal Article
NSTA is breaking new ground with this month’s issue of Science Scope. For the first time, an NSTA journal is focused on action research and the role teachers play as classroom researchers. This issue chronicles the challenges and journeys teachers ...
Journal Article
Guest Editorial: A Powerful Way to Learn
If our classroom instruction is to truly reflect what scientists do, it is important to put students in situations in which they are expected to ask questions about the natural world, design investigations to answer these questions, collect data, and...
Journal Article
Idea Bank: Explaining Biological Phenomena
In this Idea Bank, the author provides two classroom activities that integrate argumentation, explanation, and the use of evidence with biology content. The first example fits within an ecology unit; the second works well in one on evolution. These e...
Journal Article
Safer Science: Shock and Awe—Peroxide Safety
What two things do diethyl ether, butadiene, diethylkatene, 2-propanol, and cyclohexene have in common? These chemicals can all be found in high school storage rooms and can all form dangerous peroxides. How dangerous are they? If the cap of an ether...
Journal Article
Method and Strategies: Supporting Ideas With Evidence
One way to help elementary students see connections more easily and to make their thinking more visible is to teach them to approach scientific investigation and problem solving as scientists do—from the framework of “finding evidence to support ...
Journal Article
The Benefits of Formative Assessments for Teaching and Learning
Formative assessments are usually informal and can range from oral question-and-answer sessions in class to performance events or quizzes. Stiggens and DuFour (2009) state that teachers and schools should use formative assessments to clarify what stu...
Journal Article
How can a teacher simultaneously teach science concepts through inquiry while helping students learn about the nature of science? After pondering this question in their own teaching, the authors developed a 5E learning cycle lesson (Bybee et al. 2006...
Journal Article
This article presents a projectile motion lesson for high school physics that guides students through phases of exploration, concept development, and application. Students release a marble on a toy race-car track and model its range as a function of ...
Journal Article
Favorite Demonstration: More to the Color of Roses Than Meets the Eyes
The introduction of chemical concepts through concrete examples and interest-arousing demonstrations and activities is well accepted as an engaging and effective pedagogical method (Ealy and Ealy 1995; Gilbert et al. 1994; Katz 1991; Shakhashiri 1983...
Journal Article
Preservice preparation courses for elementary teachers of science can provide opportunities to build pedagogical content knowledge. One common concern of preservice teachers is how to cope with a preplanned lesson that does not proceed as planned. Pr...
Journal Article
Use of Thermochrons in the Classroom
Preservice elementary education students often do not have a good feel for the process of science. Many may be acquainted with the steps of the scientific method but have never been through the scientific process. An exercise was designed using tempe...
Journal Article
Every Day Science Calendar: September 2010
This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer....
Journal Article
Teacher’s Toolkit: Misconceptions in the science classroom
To address misconceptions, teachers first need to uncover them. Although misconceptions will surely emerge as you move through a lesson, it’s best to identify them prior to new learning. Here’s where the role of preassessment goes beyond uncoveri...
Journal Article
Integrating Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics to Evaluate Global Water Problems
An interdisciplinary and context-driven course focused on global water issues was developed and taught at the college level. Students designed a semester-long research project, collected and analyzed data, and ultimately presented their results and c...
Journal Article
The Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology Program provides teachers and students with the opportunity and materials to participate in regionally focused ecological studies under the guidance of a mentor scientist working on a similar study. The Harvard F...
Journal Article
Creative Exercises in General Chemistry: A Student-Centered Assessment
Creative exercises (CEs) are a form of assessment in which students are given a prompt and asked to write down as many distinct, correct, and relevant facts about the prompt as they can. Students receive credit for each fact that they include that is...
Book Chapter
The Teaching of Science: Contemporary Challenges
This chapter introduces the subsequent chapters with major themes and an emphasis for the book. It also sets forth the themes of curriculum and instruction as they relate to science teachers. ...
Book Chapter
The Teaching of Science Content
This chapter presents the ideals and spirit of Paul F-Brandwein. In particular, it brings contemporary ideas to themes that he presented almost 50 years ago. Those themes include the substance of science education, curricular structure, and the style...
Book Chapter
The Science Curriculum and Classroom Instruction
This chapter uses the major contributions of Bob Karplus to develop several important themes that have emerged in the past five decades of curriculum and instruction in science. The chapter begins with a perspective on curriculum development and curr...
Book Chapter
The 2008 Robert H. Carleton Lecture provides the content for Chapter 4. The chapter centers on the themes of teaching science as inquiry. After a brief introduction to the history of inquiry in science education, the national standards are used as t...
Book Chapter
Science Teaching and Assessing Students’ Scientific Literacy
This chapter introduces some dimensions of scientific literacy and describes PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, as the basis for understanding scientific literacy from both teaching and assessment perspectives. Most science educa...
Book Chapter
Fulfilling National Aspirations Through Curriculum Reform
This chapter and chapter 7 provide contemporary perspectives on the response of science education to national priorities and goals. This theme is explored with reflections from the Sputnik era of curriculum reform. Reflecting on the Sputnik era provi...
Book Chapter
Teaching Science as Inquiry and Developing 21st-Century Skills
Contemporary national aspirations also include maintaining economic competitiveness. The economic theme is a relatively short-term goal, and for science education it implies preparation of a 21st-century workforce. For the science teacher, this aspir...
Book Chapter
The authors contend that preservice training in Project-Based Science (PBS) facilitates early faithful implementation of PBS, which in turn provides students with the opportunity to engage in the public discourse and debate advocated in Goals 2000 Ob...
Book Chapter
Using Socioscientific Issues as Contexts for Teaching Concepts and Content
This chapter focuses upon the conceptual development and implementation of a socioscientific issues (SSI) curriculum in two high school science classrooms. The scenarios and perspectives described in this chapter exemplify fundamental examples of be...
Book Chapter
Securing a “Voice”: The Environmental Science Summer Research Experience for Young Women
Roland Park Country School is an urban college preparatory school for students in grades K–12 located in Baltimore, Maryland. An independent all-girls school, the institution maintains a commitment to community outreach to address issues of equity ...
Book Chapter
Two settings build the premise for this chapter and comprise the Connecting Humans and Nature through Conservation Experiences (CHANCE) program. The first setting is a summer field course in Costa Rica and the second is the regular school classroom d...