JoinAll Resources
Journal Article
Science and Literacy: Tools for Life
This article describes three interconnected strategies to help form the structure of support that you and your students can use to reach both goals simultaneously: performance expectations for students, explicit teaching strategies that support inqui...
Journal Article
Idea Bank: The Encyclopedia of Earth
For reliable information on the environment, students and teachers can turn to the Encyclopedia of Earth (EoE). Based at Boston University (BU) and operated in partnership with the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), the EoE is a...
Journal Article
Take plant lessons outdoors with this engaging and inquiry-based activity in which third-grade students learn how to apply soil conservation methods to growing plants. They also collect data and draw conclusions about the effectiveness of their metho...
Journal Article
Editor’s Roundtable: Differentiated instruction to the rescue!
Differentiated Instruction (DI) is an ongoing practice: teachers intentionally and systematically discover and plan lessons around the strengths, needs, prior knowledge, and attitudes of their students. Teachers must routinely consider not just the �...
Journal Article
Career of the Month: An Interview with Food Policy Researcher Caitlin Boon
From safety to nutrition, food policy researchers work to improve what we eat. They examine evidence found by experts in food science, consumer behavior, taste perception, nutrition, and many other related fields. Using this information, these scient...
Journal Article
Editor’s Corner: Why Study Environmental Issues?
There are many compelling reasons to include environmental education (EE) in our science classes. Environmental issues are interdisciplinary—facilitating their inclusion in both physical and life science. They are also complex, providing students w...
Journal Article
Geospatial technologies have emerged over the last 15 years as one of the key tools used by environmental scientists (NRC 2006). In fact, educators have recognized that coupling geospatial technologies with environmental science topics and scientific...
Journal Article
Guest Editorial: Discovering life
In this editorial piece, the author shares how he spent over 20 years as a corporate manager for a financial printing firm. He further explains how bringing a company public or coordinating a corporate merger were difficult tasks, but they were child...
Journal Article
Differentiation Through Choice: Using a Think-Tac-Toe for Science Content
Differentiation can begin with a single lesson, expand to a unit, and finally grow to be a natural part of a teacher’s daily practice. The Think-Tac-Toe, described in this article, can evaluate students’ learning during and at the conclusion of a...
Book Chapter
Birds, Bugs, and Butterflies: Science Lessons for Your Outdoor Classroom
Among the wild animals that may travel through a school yard, birds, bugs, and butterflies are the most common—the focus of most of the lessons in this chapter. It offers a variety of activities to allow you to “tame” the wildlife to help you t...
Book Chapter
The same water that has existed on Earth for millions of years travels through a series of steps in a cycle from mountains to the sea, flows in and out of the cells in your body, and comprises 95% of the mass of a jellyfish. In short, water is the co...
Book Chapter
It is easy for ecology to degenerate into lists of vocabulary words and isolated concepts, leaving students without an appreciation for the complexity of ecological systems. This chapter is designed to help students think about the connections betwee...
Book Chapter
This chapter provides an overview of the book that has everything needed to boost students' science and reading skills. Start by learning about the strategies you need in Chapters 2 and 3, and then dive into the 12 content chapters. As you work throu...
Book Chapter
There are many misconceptions about the urinary system. The misconceptions make it hard for students to understand the critical role of the kidneys. This chapter starts out by having students identify their current ideas about urination and leads the...
Book Chapter
Students often believe that classification is an innate system in nature, discovered whole and unchanged by scientists. In this chapter, students will get a brief introduction to how classification has changed over the years by studying the odd organ...
Book Chapter
The word adaptation, as used in everyday speech, refers to a choice that individuals make to adjust to a new environment. In biology, adaptation refers to changes in populations that result from natural selection. This chapter uses a simulation invol...
Book Chapter
Bacteria: The Good, The Bad, and Getting Rid of the Ugly
Most students think about bacteria primarily in the context of disease. However, bacteria are the most numerous organisms on Earth, and only a fraction of them cause disease. The exploration in this chapter—growing bacteria from the environment—i...
Book Chapter
As mammals that live in the water, whales have been an enigma since the time of Darwin. In the past 20 years, biologists and paleontologists have uncovered a remarkably complete story of whales’ transition from land to water. The evolution of whale...
Book Chapter
Reading strategies can be important for helping students improve reading, but students need something more. They need to begin to view reading as an active search for meaning that is within their control. In this chapter find out how teachers can ch...
Book Chapter
How Do You Know That? Helping Students With Claims and Evidence
Making claims (often called conclusions) and providing evidence are at the heart of the practice of science. Any simple activity that has students focus on making a claim and supporting it with evidence can be used as a starting point for introducing...
Book Chapter
This chapter has two main goals. The first goal is to ease students into the reading procedures described in Chapter 1 by using two reading passages—“On Your Mark!” allows students to practice using the codes to show what they are thinking as t...
Book Chapter
The lesson in this chapter is designed to open a unit on cells and cell parts. In the exploration, students will view plant, animal, and bacteria cells through a microscope while looking for the answers to their own questions about cells. The reading...
Book Chapter
The basic ideas in this chapter are simple. The cell duplicates important parts (including DNA) and then divides in half. Students often find the topic of cell division difficult because they become bogged down in the immense vocabulary associated wi...
Book Chapter
All animals have some form of a skeleton. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals have an internal skeleton, made of bones or cartilage. Arthropods have a stiff internal skeleton. Worms and other soft-bodied invertebrates have a hydrostatic sk...
Book Chapter
This chapter focuses on the relationship between genes and alcoholism. Examining this relationship can help students make wise choices about drinking, and it also can help them gain a wider perspective on genetics—a perspective that can help them u...
Book Chapter
Materials Repurposed: Find a Wealth of Free Resources at Your Local Recycling Center
By looking at the function and purpose of any piece of equipment, a creative teacher can find a suitable replacement for many premade science materials, sometimes from the most unlikely places. This chapter features a few of the recyclable items the ...
Book Chapter
A New Challenge for Science Education Leaders: Developing 21st-Century Workforce Skills
Contemporary justification for a vision of improved science education resides in themes such as education and the economy, basic skills for the workforce, and thinking for a living. Such themes differ from earlier justifications such as the space rac...
Book Chapter
The authors argue throughout this book, meaningful, lasting change in the quality of secondary science is going to depend on what teachers do for themselves. This book, thanks to the amount of formal and informal input we have had from secondary scie...
Journal Article
Special clothing is worn by “community helpers” such as police officers, nurses, firefighters, cafeteria workers, dentists, and waste management workers as they do their jobs. The special clothing allows workers to be safe. Therefore, exploring h...
Journal Article
Everyday Engineering: What makes a better box?
Every morning, many Americans start their day with a bowl of cereal. Some spend time while they eat breakfast reading the back of the cereal box, but few consider its size, shape, and construction, or realize that it was designed by an engineer. This...
NSTA Press Book
The Frugal Science Teacher, PreK-5: Strategies and Activities
Teachers of all grades and disciplines often dip into their own wallets to outfit their classrooms with materials and supplies that school and district budgets can’t—or won’t—cover. Science teachers tend to find themselves supplementing their...
Journal Article
Unit Pages: Differentiation for 200 Students
Based upon the models of differentiated instruction (Tomlinson and Edison 2003) and Layered Curriculum (Nunley 2004), the author the Unit Pages strategy. Just like Layered Curriculum, the pages can be handed directly to students, allowing them to tak...