All Resources

Journal Article

Editor’s Note: Reaching Out

The National Science Education Teaching Standards state that students should be provided with opportunities to use resources outside the classroom (Standard D; NRC 1996). Involving parents in learning, including informal learning sites, and tapping i...

Journal Article

Scope on the Skies: End of the line for a star like ours

Stars of different masses have varying life spans, with the more massive stars “burning out” more quickly than stars of lower masses. How or what they do when they burn out also varies, depending on the mass of the star. All stars are called main...

Journal Article

The Built Environment

For a science teacher in a city, it can sometimes be a challenge to find curricula that are geared specifically toward urban students. The author tackled this dilemma by creating a unit that focused on the urban surroundings experienced by his second...

Journal Article

Idea Bank: Two Green Thumbs Up!

Teaching with movie clips is one strategy to increase student understanding of environmental science. Whether accurate or not, “movie science” can expose students to phenomena that are difficult to explore in the typical classroom. In addition, a...

Journal Article

Natural Resources: Outdoor Classrooms

An outdoor classroom is the ideal vehicle for community involvement: Parents, native plant societies, 4-H, garden clubs, and master naturalists are all resources waiting to be tapped, as are local businesses offering support. If you enlist your commu...

Journal Article

Investigating Aquatic Dead Zones

This article features two engaging high school activities that include current scientific information, data, and authentic case studies. The activities address the physical, biological, and chemical processes that are associated with oxygen-depleted ...

Journal Article

From Mystery Seed to Mangrove Island

Introducing a mystery object is an easy strategy to implement and allows teachers to pre-assess students’ knowledge about local natural resources. Misconceptions can be noted as teachers record initial inquiries and wonderings on charts. Using the ...

Journal Article

The Farmer in the Lab

Agriculture can play a key role in fostering scientific literacy because it brings important plant and ecosystem concepts into the classroom. Plus, agriculture, like science, is not static and includes much trial and error, investigation, and innovat...

Journal Article

Teaching Through Trade Books: How It’s Made

Your students are most likely not knowledgeable about the raw materials, the design processes, and the technology involved in manufacturing the products they use everyday. Making connections with local manufacturers can connect students to the real s...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Visual formative assessments—The use of images to quickly assess and record student learning

Visual formative assessments (VFAs) allow more free more time for direct instruction. VFA’s guide students in using simple images to demonstrate the essential learnings within a unit to themselves and the teacher. VFAs are powerful because they eng...

Journal Article

The CORALS Connection

The Ocean, Reefs, Aquariums, Literacy, and Stewardship (CORALS) research program helps students connect global environmental issues to local concerns and personal choices. During the 18-week program, students strengthen their understanding of coral r...

Journal Article

Turtle Girls

The day the Turtle Girls received Montel’s adoption papers, piercing screams ricocheted across the school grounds instantaneously and simultaneously—in that moment, each student felt the joy of civic stewardship. Read on find out how a visit to T...

Journal Article

Tried and True: The view at the zoo—Using a photographic scavenger hunt as the basis for an interdisciplinary field trip

Most educators have a love-hate relationship with field trips. On the one hand, field trips are a great way to get students out of the building, enhance learning, and have some fun. On the other hand, field trips are a lot of work and worry. Especial...

Journal Article

Living Off the Land

Fourth-grade students at Cutchogue East Elementary School in Cutchogue, New York learned about dependence on natural resources for survival on a visit to Downs Farm Preserve at Fort Corchaug. This is a slice of preserved land just eight minutes beyon...

Journal Article

Getting Students to be Successful, Independent Investigators

Middle school students often struggle when writing testable problems, planning valid and reliable procedures, and drawing meaningful evidence-based conclusions. To address this issue, the author created a student-centered lab handout to facilitate th...

Journal Article

Boulder Creek Study

Boulder Creek runs literally in the backyard of Donnelly Elementary School and happens to be on the EPA list of impaired water bodies. Therefore, a unique opportunity for problem solving opened the door to an exciting chance for students to become sc...

Journal Article

Safer Science: NSTA Portal to Science Safety

The National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) Science Safety Advisory Board recently launched the Safety in the Science Classroom portal. This portal serves as a gateway to safety resources for teachers, supervisors, and administrators. It als...

Journal Article

Idea Bank: Climate Change Inquiries

How can students engage in authentic inquiry on global climate change if they are not able to do the actual experiments? Many questions about climate change emerge over large areas and long periods of time. The good news is that much of the data from...

Journal Article

Science Shorts: Action Figures

With upper-elementary students, using the skeletal system can be a productive first step in learning about the various systems in the human body. Of all the systems, the skeletal system seems to be the most familiar to students. This lesson, which he...

Book Chapter

Looking Forward Into the 21st Century: Implications for the Science Leader

Science education and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education are often used interchangeably. As science educators in search of our place in STEM education, we face a professional identity crisis. In this chapter, the autho...

Journal Article

Building a Scientist-Science Educator Collaboration: Establishing the Inquiry Institute

This article describes the development of the Inquiry Institute, a collaboration of scientists from a science department and science educators from a school of education. The history of the institute and the benefits to students, faculty, and the ins...

Journal Article

Teaching Through Trade Books: Can You See Me Now?

“You can’t see me” is a popular childhood taunt, and although young children may not understand that hiding in plain sight does not conceal them, it does connect with a lesson about camouflage. This month, students will learn that camouflage is...

Journal Article

Editor’s Roundtable: A world of data to explore

Middle-level students can analyze existing data as well as collect it firsthand so that they can better understand natural phenomena and the methods we use to study them. Use the activities described in this issue of Science Scope to relate data coll...

Journal Article

Laboratory Notebooks in the Science Classroom

Lab notebooks provide students with authentic science experiences as they become active, practicing scientists. Teachers gain insight into students’ understanding of science content and processes, while students create a lasting personal resource. ...

Journal Article

Idea Bank: Content Reading in Science Class

Science education depends on literacy. But adding reading to a curriculum that is already packed with content, experiments, and activities can be tough. So how can a teacher accomplish this, while ensuring that students have multiple opportunities fo...

Journal Article

Point of View: How to Survive an Academic Job Interview

Career development is an important issue, and there are aspects of finding the right position that are particular to science faculty. Although this article does not follow the usual format and subject of submissions to our Point of View column, we ha...

Journal Article

Clash of the Titans

WebQuests and the 5E learning cycle are titans of the science classroom. These popular inquiry-based strategies are most often used as separate entities, but the author has discovered that using a combined WebQuest and 5E learning cycle format taps i...

Journal Article

Environmental Education and Service Learning in the Tropics: Making Global Connections

Research has suggested that a service-learning component can add a powerful dimension to learning course content in a variety of science disciplines, in addition to assisting students in seeing connections between their studies and the world outside ...

Journal Article

Writing Better Lab Reports

As science teachers at a suburban California high school, the authors were concerned about the lab report conclusions written by their upper-level chemistry, biology, and ecology students—which were consistently of poor quality. Their work lacked i...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: SSSNOW Project—Helping make science cool for students

In the atmosphere or on the ground, snow provides students with unique opportunities to discover winter weather patterns. Traditionally, when students study weather, it is limited to the collection of data one would see on a weather report. However, ...

Journal Article

Case Study: The Chemistry of Curcumin, the Health Promoting Ingredient in Turmeric

Case studies pertaining to the health benefits of foods can be particularly effective in engaging students and in teaching core concepts in science (Heidemann and Urquart 2005). This case study focuses on the chemistry of curcumin, the health-promoti...

Journal Article

Tech Trek: Cell phones for science

Although in some schools cell phones have to be turned off or perhaps kept in lockers to avoid misuse, the authors hope to demonstrate in this article how they can be used under supervision to assist learning. This ubiquitous device can be a powerful...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Is knowledge random? Introducing sampling and bias through outdoor inquiry

Sampling, very generally, is the process of learning about something by selecting and assessing representative parts of that population or object. In the inquiry activity described here, students learned about sampling techniques as they estimated th...

Journal Article

How Middle School Students Come Face to Face With Down Syndrome Research

This article discusses how real research on Down syndrome, being done in a lab at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), was incorporated into a laboratory activity for middle school students. The activity asked students to evalua...

Journal Article

Research and Teaching: Enticing Students to Enter Into Undergraduate Research—The Instrumentality of an Undergraduate Course

To encourage students to seek research opportunities with campus faculty, one large university in the Southeast created a course entitled Science for All. A major goal of the course was to encourage students to work directly with faculty on research ...

Journal Article

Career of the Month: An Interview With Medical Diagnostics Scientist Bernhard Weigl

Medical diagnostics help us evaluate a range of disorders, such as cancer and infectious diseases. In the United States and other developed countries, doctors have access to advanced equipment and laboratories that provide reliable diagnoses. As a re...