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Book Chapter
The Many Faces of Leadership in a Complex Environment
While the full implementation of the leadership approach recommended in this chapter has many facets, the foundation of that leadership style is to “keep you eye on the prize.” That is, every decision should consider at its nucleus how it will su...
Book Chapter
Content Coverage in the Role of Instructional Leadership
The variability in content coverage is likely to produce differences in student learning outcomes. The authors use this variability to reinforce their view that the management of content coverage, including association time allocation, is among the m...
Book Chapter
The Role of Teacher Leadership in Science Education
Professional development activities deepen content knowledge, support inquiry-based teaching, help teachers tap into student thinking, and assist in implementing curriculum materials and interpreting assessment systems. This chapter examines teachers...
Book Chapter
Getting Results From Science Teacher Leadership: The Critical Role of Principals
There is growing evidence that teacher leaders and principals are indeed effecting-and perhaps-essential allies in leading schoolwide improvement in teacher effectiveness and student learning. This chapter opens with a detailed look at the empirical ...
Book Chapter
Developing and Sustaining Leadership in Science Education
It can be argued that the most important guiding force leading to a teacher’s continued improvement is having a good role model, such as a colleague who is an experienced leader. This chapter provides a detailed description of a master’s degree p...
Book Chapter
Technology Leadership for the 21st Century
This chapter addresses (a) how transformational leadership in the educational community is crucial for effective and appropriate infusion of educational technology as a fundamental part of K-12 education; (b) how educational leaders can create a robu...
NSTA Press Book
Reforming Secondary Science Instruction
Science education reform can seem a daunting task to high school science teachers. So, you might ask, why should I be bothered? The answer is that today’s students simply do not have the skill sets necessary for life in our global economy. ...
Book Chapter
Change in Secondary Science Settings: A Voice From the Field
Learning science by inquiry is central to science education reforms. In today’s working world, students need skills for finding, organizing, and managing information. They also need rich skills for working with others and for communicating orally a...
Journal Article
Science Sampler: Making a leap toward concrete inferences
Scientists are always working at refining their observations to help them make that leap toward stronger inferences. Teaching students to make inferences means showing them how to take their careful observations and use them to explain natural phenom...
Journal Article
With the use of technology such as Global Positioning System (GPS) units and Google Earth for a simple-machine scavenger hunt, you will transform a standard identification activity into an exciting learning experience that motivates students, incorpo...
Journal Article
Science 101: Do plants communicate?
Oh yes. Sometimes their conversation is flowery, sometimes not. Plants with problems try to converse and get to the root of the problem, but if not, they have been known to stalk one another. This often creates a situation where one plant leaves town...
Journal Article
The Prepared Practitioner: Brain-Based Education
Brain-based is an increasingly popular buzzword in educational circles. Brain research promises to take teaching from (supposedly) mere craft knowledge to a scientifically based realm from which researchers can make broadly applicable, objective conc...
Journal Article
When it comes to directly interacting with and doing experiments with organisms, plants have some distinct advantages over animals. Their diversity and accessibility allows students to use them in experiments, thus practicing important science inquir...
Journal Article
Science Shorts: Hypothesis Testing—It’s Okay to Be Wrong
Students often seek affirmation from their teachers about their thinking and can be embarrassed at the thought of being “wrong.” In science, we want children to feel comfortable making hypotheses and to know that it’s the investigative process�...
Journal Article
Science Sampler: Using seashells to teach classification
Everyone loves the beach. Unfortunately, most schools don’t have access to beachfront property. So, why not bring the beach to the classroom? This seashell lab investigation is great because students enjoy it, they learn that science is a way to so...
Journal Article
From Cookbook to Experimental Design
Developing expertise, whether from cook to chef or from student to scientist, occurs over time and requires encouragement, guidance, and support. One key goal of an elementary science program should be to move students toward expertise in their abili...
Journal Article
Editor’s Corner: Renaissance Thinking
Although it may be an old-school habit of mind with roots in the Renaissance, interdisciplinary thinking has never been more important than in the modern world. In their daily lives, our students will need to understand complex problems and evaluate ...
Journal Article
Biological Clocks and Circadian Rhythms
The study of biological clocks and circadian rhythms is an excellent way to address the inquiry strand in the National Science Education Standards (NSES) (NRC 1996). Students can study these everyday phenomena by designing experiments, gathering and ...
Journal Article
The Potential da Vinci in All of Us
The study of the human form is fundamental to both science and art curricula. For vertebrates, perhaps no feature is more important than the skeleton to determine observable form and function. As Leonard da Vinci’s famous Proportions of the Human F...
Journal Article
Tried and True: Chipping away at the rock cycle
The National Science Education Standards recommend that middle school students have a clear understanding of the history, composition, and formative processes that shape the Earth. To accomplish this goal, the authors use an engaging activity that us...
Journal Article
Why not combine the use of technology with the excitement of a scavenger hunt that moves middle-level students out into the “wilds” of their school campus to classify plants? In the lesson plan described here, students embark on a botanical scav...
Book Chapter
Building a Culture of Faculty-Owned Assessment
With so much at stake for both students and institutions, it is imperative that colleges and universities support faculty and others in comprehensive assessment efforts and act on changes suggested by assessment data. If higher education is to mainta...
Book Chapter
At Montana State University (MSU) a variety of strategies have been used to begin to quantitatively assess how students are learning in the science classroom. The author reviews in this chapter some of the work that has helped MSU craft quantitative ...
Book Chapter
Alternative Forms of Assessment for The College Science Laboratory
A basic definition of alternative assessment is any type of evaluation that does not use traditional forms of paper-and-pencil testing. Too often new forms of teaching and learning are coupled with traditional forms of student assessment rather than ...
Book Chapter
Survey Instrument Validation: The First Commandment of Educational Research
Survey instrument validation may be the most difficult task for a scientist starting to conduct educational research. A survey that is preceived to be inadequately validated will generally be rejected for publication, but there is little guidance on ...
Book Chapter
The past two decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in how science is taught. Electronic portfolios—hereafter referred to as e-portfolios—represent one possible way to bring assessment into alignment with technology-based instruction. In this ch...
Book Chapter
The integration of math, science, and technology (MST) into robust inquiry-based learning opportunities is a tall order for any educator. However, it is critical to do so throughout the learning process. This chapter addresses some of the deficiencie...
Book Chapter
Gauging the Nature of Science (NOS): An Alternate Form of Assessment
Science teachers of all disciplines can use students' NOS (nature of science) scores as an alternate form of assessment. In addition to traditional forms of assessment like exams and quizzes, NOS levels can truly indicate students' understanding of s...
Book Chapter
In recent years, the value of using authentic assessments to evaluate student learning has been discussed at all levels. The use of authentic assessments, in the use of lesson plans, has proven to be a valuable tool for the evaluation of content mast...
Book Chapter
Formative Assessment With Student Remotes and E-mail
This chapter features two formative assessment techniques that were implemented in several sections of the first semester of an introductory physics class at East Stroudsburg University. The performance of these students was compared to sections in w...