JoinAll Resources
eBook
The Big Ideas of Nanoscale Science and Engineering: A Guidebook for Secondary Teachers (e-book)
Given the ability of nanoscience and nanotechnology to exploit the unique properties that matter exhibits at the nanoscale, the research resulting from these emerging fields is poised to dramatically affect everyday life....
eBook
Readings in Science Methods, K–8 (e-book)
If you’re teaching an introductory science education course in a college or university, Readings in Science Methods, K–8, with its blend of theory, research, and examples of best practices, can serve as your only text, your primary text, or a sup...
eBook
Celebrating Cultural Diversity: Science Learning for All (e-book)
Science Learning for All: Celebrating Cultural Diversity covers three must-know” areas of multicultural science education: inclusive curriculum design, multicultural teaching strategies, and language diversity in science teaching and learning. Wit...
eBook
Building Successful Partnerships: Community Connections for Science Education (e-book)
No single educator can help children learn all they need to become scientifically literate. Resources are all around us—not only in traditional science classrooms and laboratories, but also in gardens, nature centers, parks, youth programs, museums...
eBook
Practicing Science: The Investigative Approach in College Science Teaching (e-book)
In this collection of ten articles reprinted from the Journal of College Science Teaching, college and university science professors show how they have used investigative learning—or inquiry-based instruction—to introduce students to the proce...
eBook
For extra credit or just for the fun of it—why not try a brainteaser? This collection brings together the first 100 brainteasers from Quantum magazine, published by the National Science Teachers Association in collaboration with the Russian magazin...
eBook
Taking Charge: An Introduction to Electricity (e-book)
Spark your students’ interest in electricity. Taking Charge is designed to help teachers bring the intimidating subject of electricity to students in the middle grades. These teacher-tested, hands-on activities use readily available materials and...
Journal Article
In “The Magic Mirror” lessons described here, children explore reflection and mirror phenomena in the environment. They make a mirror, explore a hinged mirror with its many images, and look at symmetries. The activities create great interest amon...
Journal Article
Teaching Through Trade Books: Flick a Switch
When students flick on lights, boot up a computer, or turn on a television, do they think about how that energy is produced? The majority of electricity in the United States is generated from power plants that burn fossil fuels, causing large amounts...
Journal Article
Scope on Safety: Beware of students bearing kits
After the holidays, many students are eager to bring in cool science-related gifts to share with their classmates. Items like laser pointers, introductory chemistry sets, rocketry kits, electronics/electricity kits, and microscopes to name a few, mus...
Journal Article
The Prepared Practitioner: Central Limit Theorem
Statistics have been an important part of science since Gregor Mendel used pea plants to study heredity in the 19th century, if not before. Everyday life is filled with statistics—about sports, the stock market, weather, and so on. Understanding ru...
Journal Article
Science Sampler: Walking Out Graphs
In the Walking Out Graphs Lesson described here, students experience several types of representations used to describe motion, including words, sentences, equations, graphs, data tables, and actions. The most important theme of this lesson is that st...
Journal Article
The Pennies-as-Electrons Analogy
Everyday experiences familiarize students with the ways in which electricity is used, but often the underlying concepts remain a mystery. Teachers often use analogies to help students relate the flow of electrons to other common systems, but many tim...
Journal Article
Visualizing the Earth and Moon Relationship via Scaled Drawings
Students’ difficulties with accurately conceptualizing the relationships among the Earth, Moon, and Sun are well documented. Any teacher who has seen the film A Private Universe (Schneps and Sadler 1988) will remember the challenge the interviewees...
Journal Article
Idea Bank: ExploraVision—Extracurricular Research and Development
The ExploraVision model encourages students to use their knowledge and creativity to solve real-world problems. It gives any student, at any grade level, the opportunity to participate in scientific collaboration. This Idea Bank introduces the Explor...
Journal Article
Big Ideas at a Very Small Scale
The purpose of this article is to share a learning-cycle sequence of lessons designed to convey the particulate nature of matter through use of physical models and analogical thinking. This activity was adapted from Conceptual Chemistry, a long-runni...
Journal Article
Safer Science: Taking Responsibility for Safety
In science classes and labs, it is the teacher’s professional responsibility to ensure student safety by seeking out safety information that is independent of what is found in the lab manual and making informed judgments. Therefore, teachers must u...
Journal Article
Using Wiggins and McTighe’s (1998) concept of Big Ideas, the authors planned and designed an electricity investigation to address common student misconceptions about static electricity. With Styrofoam plates and transparent tape, elementary student...
Journal Article
Every Day Science: December 2009
This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer....
Journal Article
On a partly sunny afternoon, a fourth-grade class at the Marietta Center for Advanced Academics in Marietta, Georgia, was gearing up to explore key concepts regarding the nature of light. Armed with translucent beads and white pipe cleaners, the clas...
Journal Article
Editor’s Note: Seeing in the Dark
It seems like such a simple concept, seeing an object; light leaves its source, is reflected off an object, and travels into our eyes. Without light, we cannot see. Light and electricity may seem to be simple concepts, but don’t be fooled. Assess s...
Journal Article
Conceptually, students are typically introduced to light as a type of wave. However, children struggle to understand this model because it is highly abstract. Light can be represented more concretely using the photon model. According to this scientif...
Journal Article
Despite student interest, the heart is often a poorly understood topic in biology. To help students understand this vital organ’s physiology, the author created this investigation activity involving the mammalian heart and its role in the circulato...
Journal Article
Editor’s Corner: STEM Beyond the Classroom
One of our most important tasks as science educators is to encourage students to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). So, how do we encourage more students to consider STEM careers? It is a multilayered proble...
Journal Article
Students’ eyes grow wide with wonder as they get a motor to work or make a bulb light for the first time. As these daunting feats of electrical engineering remind us, teaching electricity is invariably rewarding and worthwhile. In this inquiry-base...
Journal Article
Using Powers of 10 to Help Students Develop Temporal Benchmarks
One of the greatest challenges for middle school Earth science teachers is helping our students get a feel for the magnitude of the long spans that make up Earth’s history. The intent of the strategy presented here is to help middle school students...
Journal Article
To help establish common language, to shape a common vision for a science program, guide individual and group reflection on instruction, and support partner teachers in eliciting the involvement of their colleagues, the North Cascades and Olympic Sci...