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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...
Book Chapter
Engaging Students in Content Learning and Scientific Critique Through a Nanoscience Context
Nanoscience is increasingly visible in scientific endeavors, new technologies, and engineered products. Citizens and students must develop a sense of what constitutes scientific evidence of the positive and negative effects as well as side effects o...
Book Chapter
As in many other education jurisdictions, environmental education in Ontario is infused throughout the science curriculum. This infusion requires students to not only understand the science behind environmental issues, but also be provided with “me...
Book Chapter
An “HOLA” Approach to Learning Science
Implementing classroom instructional strategies that lend themselves to both unidimensional assessments and alternative assessments provide evidence of proficiency that can satisfy both school and student learning evaluations. Barnard Environmental M...
Book Chapter
Project-Based After-School Science in New York City
In this chapter, the authors report on how inner city high school students learn science through participation in an after-school science program called Explore! Project-based science instruction (PBSI) was used as the main method of instruction in w...
Book Chapter
Students as Scientists: Guidelines for Teaching Science Through Disciplinary Inquiry
Teaching Science as Inquiry (TSI) provides a foundation for engaging both teachers and students in disciplinary inquiry. This chapter describes a framework of teaching and learning developed to help overcome the difficulty in teaching the disciplinar...
Book Chapter
“Who Ate Our Corn?” We Want to Know and So Should You!
“Who ate our corn?” sounds like a simple enough question but is designed to intrigue students and launch them on a quest to find answers and to ask more questions. That is the goal of the Future Scientists Program featured in this chapter. The Fu...
Book Chapter
Applications of Biology as Part of a Preservice Program for Science Teachers
The Applications of Biology course provides students with the opportunity to apply scientific information in making decisions about real-world issues. Within the context of the course, students are introduced to an applications approach, with as many...
Book Chapter
Goal 3 of the National Science Education Standards (NSES) calls for students to “engage intelligently in public discourse and debate about matters of scientific and technological concern” (NRC 1996, p. 13). The unit described in this chapter, “...
Book Chapter
Tahoma Outdoor Academy: Learning About Science and the Environment Inside and Outside the Classroom
Taking students outside of the classroom is recognized as a valid and important pedagogical practice; however, teachers at all levels feel challenged when faced with integrating informal, outdoor, and community settings with subject-specific curricul...
Book Chapter
Developing Students’ Sense of Purpose With a Driving Question Board
The Driving Question Board (DQB) is an organizing tool used in the project-based curriculum described in this study, which serves as a visual organizer for all the curriculum’s contextualizing features. In this chapter, the authors report on the pi...
Book Chapter
Communic–Able: Writing to Learn About Emerging Diseases
High school students in a seven-week writing-intensive project at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health serve as research apprentices. This project focuses on students in need of additional development in communication, com...
Journal Article
I Want To Be Like . . . Middle School Students' Identification with Scientists on Television
This article describes a study funded by the Research on Gender in Science and Engineering (GSE) Program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The study focused on gaining a better understanding of how middle school students perceive television d...