JoinAll Resources
Book Chapter
Fractals: Self-Similar at Different Scales
Fractal geometry enables researchers to analyze complex shapes of natural objects and compare one system to another. It helps us define structure in new and useful ways. Moreover, if an object in a geological or biological context has fractal geometr...
Book Chapter
Screening My Calls: Scale and the Electromagnetic Spectrum
Light is just one type of electromagnetic radiation; it belongs to the visible portion of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. The other regions of the EM spectrum include everything from gamma rays to radio waves. They are all the same thing: electrom...
Book Chapter
Stringy Chemistry and States of Matter
Solids, liquids, and gases are familiar to students as the different states of matter. Why are some substances gases and some solid at room temperature? This exercise helps students explore the basic concepts behind intermolecular bonding and how it ...
Book Chapter
Our sensory organs are finely tuned instruments that not only detect but also measure different environmental inputs. In particular, our eyes, ears, and nose are extraordinary sensors. The tasks these organs face are incredibly challenging. Typical l...
Book Chapter
Beetlemice Multitudes!!! Power Law and Exponential Scaling
Scaling describes how a quantity changes over time or with the size of a system. It can also be defined as how a quantity changes in relation to any other parameter. When you stop and think about it, all of the equations in math and science are scali...
Book Chapter
Oops, I Did It Again: Errors in Measurement
Understanding the precision and accuracy of measurements is a crucial skill that scientists must develop to do their work. All measurements involve some degree of error. Knowing how to assess and work with error is an essential part of making sense o...
Book Chapter
Is a virus bigger than a bacterium? Is the distance from the Earth to the Moon greater than the diameter of the Earth? In this investigation, students explore the relative sizes of things through a card-sorting activity. The goal is to raise students...
Book Chapter
It’s Not All Relative: Relative Versus Absolute
Learning about the sizes of things and scale engages students in thinking about conceptual benchmarks for sizes. In this investigation, students learn to order objects on a relative scale, as well as to accurately label actual or absolute sizes. In a...
Book Chapter
Time Flies When You’re Learning About Scale!
Not many students would forget to say “Dinosaurs!” if you mention the Jurassic period, yet the word scale only conjures up ideas of measuring objects. Most students automatically think of measuring mass, volume, or distance, and not necessarily t...
Book Chapter
Billions of Us: Scale and Population
Population is increasingly important as both a scientific and a political subject. The world is getting more crowded. Providing students with the tools to understand population numbers is not only important for their basic understanding of their worl...
Book Chapter
When building a dollhouse or a model of a car or a cell, close attention to the details is crucial to making it look accurate and realistic. A consistent scaling factor for all details in the model is critical. In this activity, students explore scal...
Book Chapter
This story obviously is aimed at the technology standards. Two simple timing devices are mentioned with the suggestion that more are possible. These can be improved to meet the challenge or other devices could be invented. Students are being challeng...
Book Chapter
The two concepts at work here are conservation of matter and the question about many surfaces vs. fewer surfaces absorbing heat. You may wonder what this story is doing in the Earth system science area, but it has to do not only with thermodynamics a...
Book Chapter
Inquiry at the Ocean Research College Academy (ORCA)
The Ocean Research College Academy (ORCA) is a full-time, dual credit, early college program designed exclusively for Washington State Running Start (juniors and seniors in high school) students. Students in ORCA are together as a cohort for two year...
Book Chapter
Science Projects: Successful Inquires in Eighth-Grade Science
This chapter focuses on the mission of the science department of Hilo Intermediate School—to ensure that the Hawaii State Standards and Benchmarks are addressed through the seventh-grade life science and eighth-grade Earth and space science classes...
Book Chapter
Inquiry Is Elementary: Differing Approaches to Inquiry Within Two Elementary Schools
Scientific inquiry is practiced and celebrated at two elementary schools within a school district of 40,000 students, located within a first ring suburb of Minneapolis. While their approach to inquiry differs somewhat, the commitment to inquiry learn...
Book Chapter
Science as Inquiry at Sir Winston Churchill Collegiate and Vocational Institute
As a department, the science teachers at Sir Winston Churchill Collegiate and Vocational Institute share a common commitment to the ideals of teaching of science as inquiry. As individuals, they also have the flexibility to teach in ways that reflect...
Book Chapter
Erasing Lecture-Laboratory Boundaries: An Inquiry-Based Course Design
The University of Maine at Presque Isle (UMPI) is one of seven autonomous campuses within the University of Maine System. UMPI combines liberal arts and selected professional programs for 1,400 undergraduates and also serves as a cultural and educati...
Book Chapter
Enhancing the Inquiry Experience: Authentic Research in the Classroom
Inquiry in science classrooms involves the ability to pose a question, explore phenomena relating to the question, acquire new understandings, communicate new ideas, and relate or compare ideas with what other scientists have found (NRC 2000). The En...
Book Chapter
Ecological Monitoring Provides a Thematic Foundation for Student Inquiry
The Project in Hawaii’s Intertidal (OPIHI) is a network of schools and scientist volunteers engaged in the widespread, systematic monitoring of Hawaii’s rocky intertidal zones. OPIHI originated through a partnership funded by the National Science...
Book Chapter
“If We Are Supposed to Understand Science, Shouldn’t We Be Doing It?”
The author’s teaching career, like many others, began teaching high school in a basic science classroom where the students asked this chapter’s title question. But if students were going to be successful in inquiry-based science, these new ways o...
Book Chapter
Inquiry: A Challenge for Changing the Teaching of Science in Connecticut
A catalyst for inquiry gaining its rightful place of importance in Connecticut public education was the State Board of Education’s 2004 adoption of the Core Science Curriculum Framework (CSDE 2004). The framework includes a set of inquiry standards...
Book Chapter
Learning Science With Inquiry in the Clark County School District
In 2005, Project PASS—Proficiency And Success in Science—was funded as a Mathematics and Science Partnership by the Nevada Department of Education. This three-year collaborative project was initiated with the goals of improved quality of instruct...
Book Chapter
Natural Scientists: Children in Charge
This chapter discusses how the authors refined their teaching practices to allow young children to begin to develop inquiry process skills. In previous years, the process skills of science were addressed because educators felt they were vital to all ...
Book Chapter
Science Is Not a Spectator Sport: Three Principles From 15 years of Project <em>Dragonfly</em>
Project Dragonfly at Miami University was founded on the premise that the most powerful way to engage children in learning is to celebrate their voices, to invite them into the community of discovery, and to allow them to see themselves as agents of ...
Book Chapter
Student Inquiry and Research: Developing Students’ Authentic Inquiry Skills
In the 2005 NSTA monograph Exemplary Science in Grades 9–12: Standards-Based Success Stories, the authors present and discussed student inquiry at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy (IMSA) (Scheppler et al. 2005). This monograph focused o...
Book Chapter
From Wyoming to Florida, They Ask, “Why Wasn’t I Taught This Way?”
As educators recognize the power of inquiry in the classroom, the Conceptual Change Model (CCM) is gaining popularity across the country. Those who are using CCM are reporting that students are highly engaged and excited about learning and they are g...
Book Chapter
Student Outreach Initiative: Sowing the Seeds of Future Success
This chapter features the Student Outreach Initiative project developed as a collaborative research community between USDA/Agricultural Research Service/Southern Plains Area (ARS/SPA) laboratories and their local communities and schools (grades 4–1...
Book Chapter
Developing Inquiry Skills Along a Teacher Professional Continuum
The setting for this chapter is Bradley University—a midsize, private, comprehensive university in a Midwestern community of approximately a quarter million people. In the past decade, new faculty members have brought philosophies of teaching that ...
Book Chapter
Promoting Inquiry With Preservice Elementary Teachers Through a Science Content Course
Inquiry science teaching is effective at all levels, from elementary classes to higher education. It is important, therefore, that preservice education majors who will be teaching science understand the differences between inquiry instruction and ins...
Book Chapter
Developing a Relationship With Science Through Authentic Inquiry
In this chapter, the authors first describe the theoretical framework they have developed for understanding and developing their work as teachers. They start by articulating their own understanding of teaching and learning. Following this discussion,...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about systems. The probe is designed to find out whether students can recognize that things with parts that interact or influence each other are systems....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about the digestive system. The probe is designed to find out whether students realize a main function of the digestive system is to break food down into molecules that can be used by ...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about the distribution of land, oceans, freshwater, and ice. The probe is designed to find out whether students realize that most of the Earth is covered by oceans....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about light and the Moon. The probe is designed to find out what students think is the source of a full Moon's light....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about eclipses. The probe is designed to find out what students think causes a lunar eclipse....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about weight and pressure. The probe is designed to determine whether students think their weight changes when the force exerted per unit area (pressure) on a scale changes....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about magnetism. The probe is specifically designed to determine whether students believe air is necessary for magnets to work....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about dissolving. The probe is designed to find out what students think happens to sugar when it dissolves in water....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about food, transformation of matter, growth and development, conservation of mass, and systems. The concepts underlying this probe are complex. It is not important that students know ...