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Book Chapter
In this unit, students look at the signal transduction pathways that let cells sense and respond to their external and internal environments. The model organism is the free-living unicellular algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Chlamydomonas is extrem...
Book Chapter
In this unit, students explore hormonal regulation of insect development. Students look at fruit flies—Drosophila melanogaster—in various stages in their life cycles and expose larval flies to a range of concentrations of juvenile hormone. Final...
Book Chapter
In this unit, students learn about the neuromuscular system by dissecting the sciatic nerve and gastrocnemius muscle from the leg of a frog and connecting them to a force transduction apparatus. Then they learn to record myograms from the muscle prep...
Book Chapter
A Brief Introduction to Inquiry
When the term inquiry comes up in conversations about science curriculum reform and improvement, it usually is shorthand for inquiry-based learning and, by extension, inquiry-based instruction. But, what exactly is meant by inquiry-based learning? In...
Book Chapter
An Outcomes-Oriented Approach to Implementing Inquiry
This chapter provides a short overview of the process of curricular planning with special emphasis on inquiry-based instruction. It outlines a validated method that curriculum designers and coordinators can use to establish program goals, select inst...
Book Chapter
Assessing Inquiry-Based Instruction
Assessment encompasses more than just exams and papers. It also involves informally assessing student learning in progress, formally assessing students to determine their learning gains, and assessing whether the current instructional practices and c...
Book Chapter
Teaching Techniques for Inquiry Labs
Chapters 1-3 described general principles of inquiry and processes for developing and assessing an inquiry-centered course. This chapter examines the process in greater detail by outlining specific behaviors and practices that instructors can use to ...
Book Chapter
The Relationship Between Teaching and Learning
This chapter introduces a summary of research about learning and discusses the implications for teaching. The characteristics of professional development are described that can help transform teaching beliefs and practices in ways that address curren...
Book Chapter
How to Use Collaborative Learning in Your Classroom
Educators have been conducting research about the relative effects of cooperative, competitive, and individual learning for several decades. The research shows that collaborative learning experiences tend to promote higher achievement in learners tha...
Book Chapter
How to Use Science Notebooks in Your Classroom
Science notebooks can take many different forms. The important thing to remember is that they should provide a place where student experiences, data, and language can come together to form meaning. This can happen when daily entries lead to conceptua...
Book Chapter
How to Help Students Make Meaning From What They Read
Students need opportunities to develop "reading to learn" strategies. Although many students may have the ability to read text, some lack the ability to comprehend and react to it. The strategies provided in this chapter are designed to support stude...
Book Chapter
How to Help Your Students Evaluate Information
Every day, we are bombarded with information on many issues from a wide variety of sources. Today's students are especially adept at accessing information through the internet. They likely are much less adept at accessing the intent, relevance, and v...
Book Chapter
How to Help Students Construct Their Understanding of Science Concepts
Conscientious biology teachers continually strive to improve their instructional practices to enhance student learning. At the heart of this goal is a focus on making sure that students understand the biology being taught. One important way to increa...
Book Chapter
How to Promote Scientific Conversations Among Your Students
Helping students develop skills for scientific conversation has many benefits. Engaging in scientific conversation elicits students' prior knowledge, enables students to construct their understanding of science concepts, encourages all students to pa...
Book Chapter
How to Use Assessments to Improve Student Learning
The ability of students to “do” biology and to understand biology concepts is essential. Developing biology lessons and assessing for an understanding of biology skills and concepts go hand-in-hand. Well-designed biology lessons result from well-...
Book Chapter
How to Select Programs for Your Inquiry Classroom
Besides teachers and students, the most consistent presence in school science is the instructional materials. BSCS, in collaboration with the K-12 Alliance of WestEd, developed a process and set of tools to help teams of science teachers analyze inst...
Book Chapter
BSCS's Influence in Biology Education
This chapter describes the dominating concerns in science education over the past 50 years. It also discusses the way BSCS has addressed those concerns through curriculum and professional development and through research and evaluation. The chapter i...
Book Chapter
A BSCS Perspective on Contemporary Biology Education
This chapter arises from an opportunity to pause and reflect on biology education in the past and what it will be in the immediate future. Four themes are featured that address the topic of biology education—implementation of fundamental biological...
Book Chapter
This chapter outlines three major areas that play a role in equity in the science classroom—addressing issues of bias, making connections between science and society explicit, and helping students cross the border into the culture of science—each...
Book Chapter
Unifying Principles of Biology
This chapter outlines six unifying principles educators can use to organize biological concepts, thus helping to unify the otherwise disparate facts of biology. These unifying principles represent a comprehensive foundation for the biological science...
Book Chapter
Attending to Conceptual Challenges
This chapter examines some of the conceptual and reasoning difficulties commonly encountered within each unifying principle of biology, as well as those iinherent to understanding the nature of science. Suggestions are provided for teachers to uncove...
Book Chapter
Getting Started With Inquiry: Six Invitations
Student participation in inquiry serves two objectives—first, students discover that science is something more than merely learning what others already know—and second, students develop skills in interpreting data and in understanding scientific ...
Book Chapter
In the full inquiry experience in this chapter, students will put skills of inquiry together as they think like scientists and apply critical-thinking skills to evaluate new information that they collect themselves. In full inquiry, students assume m...
Book Chapter
Perspectives on Contemporary Controversial Topics in Biology Education
This chapter describes three different types of controversy and makes the case for including controversial topics in your course syllabus. It offers suggestions for handling these topics in a way that helps students apply their scientific understandi...
Book Chapter
How to Set Up and Manage Your Biology Classroom
There are a number of important practical aspects to setting up and managing a biology classroom. These include strategies for organizing students into groups, conducting laboratory work, maintaining live organisms in the classroom, leading field tri...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about infectious disease. The probe is designed to find out whether students use the germ theory to explain what causes an infectious disease like the common cold. This free selectio...
Journal Article
Career of the Month: An Interview With Science Institute Program Director Laura Heisler
Laura Heisler always wanted to apply her interest in science to help people and make a difference. As a science program director, she brings together scientists, members of the business community, and others for the benefit of both society and the sc...