All Resources

Journal Article

What’s the Matter With Teaching Children About Matter?

When it comes to learning about solids, liquids, and gases, children often bring interesting yet inaccurate ideas to the topic. When children’s ideas conflict with the concepts we seek to teach, they interfere with learning. Therefore, we must cons...

Journal Article

An Environmental Town Meeting: Balancing Environmental Decisions and Real-Life Issues

In order to help middle school students understand the many aspects that go into making decisions about environmental issues and concerns, as well as identifying the players involved in these decisions, an environmental town meeting activity was deve...

Journal Article

Research and Teaching: Calibrated Peer Review Assignments in Science Courses—Are They Designed to Promote Critical Thinking and Writing Skills?

Calibrated Peer Review (CPR), an online program that purportedly helps students develop as writers and critical thinkers, is being increasingly used by science educators. CPR is an enticing tool since it does not require instructors to grade student ...

Journal Article

Scope on Safety: Clearing the air on ventilation

Poor ventilation is often a topic of conversation relative to safety concerns in school science laboratories. Too often, school science laboratories have ventilation systems that are inappropriate and ineffective for removing hazardous chemical vapor...

Journal Article

Issues In-Depth: How “bright” is it to use CFLs? A look at the controversy

Commonly referred to as CFLs, compact fluorescent light bulbs are rapidly replacing traditional incandescent light bulbs for residential use. However, controversy and even comic parody have arisen surrounding CFL use. CFLs contain small amounts of me...

Journal Article

Tech Trek: No need to weather the storm to collect data

At a time when climate change is at the forefront of the media and is a topic of worldwide scientific inquiry, it is critical to engage middle school science students in technology-based activities that integrate climate change into course instructio...

Journal Article

Building a Better Biology Lab? Testing Tablet PC Technology in a Core Laboratory Course

Tablet PC technology can enliven the classroom environment because it is dynamic, interactive, and “organic,” relative to the rigidity of chalkboards, whiteboards, overhead projectors, and PowerPoint presentations. Unlike traditional computers, t...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Fueling interest in science—An after-school program model that works

As our society becomes more technologically advanced and jobs require additional related skills, it is important that all girls, not just those interested in science, technology, engineering, and math (commonly referred to as the STEM disciplines), t...

Journal Article

Editor’s Corner: A Look Back (2008)

The end of the year is always a time for reflection and looking back. Even though December may feel more like midyear for teachers, the end of the calendar year inevitably brings top 10 lists, reviews of the best the year had to offer, and vows for i...

Journal Article

Science Shorts: Comparing Liquids

Children experience the physical properties of liquids as they watch raindrops run down a window, observe how insects can walk on water, and notice how the “shape” of a liquid matches the container in which it is held. Thinking about similarities...

Journal Article

Career of the Month: An Interview With Astronomer/Astrophysicist Shep Doeleman

How did the first galaxies form? How old are the oldest stars? Much of the universe remains uncharted territory. As astronomers study the abundance of celestial objects and phenomena outside Earth’s atmosphere, they constantly make discoveries that...

Journal Article

Health Wise: December 2008

Teachers and students alike deal with certain levels of anxiety. But how much is too much, and what can students do to cope? ...

Journal Article

Volunteer Scientist-in-the-Classroom Partnership in Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools

In 1897, long before the entertainment industry made Nashville famous with country music and the Grand Ole Opry, the city was known as the “Athens of the South,” with numerous institutions of higher learning. A century later, four of Nashville’...

Journal Article

Methods and Strategies: Concept-Focused Teaching

One of the main problems we face in science teaching is that students are learning isolated facts and missing central concepts. For instance, consider what you know about life cycles. Chances are that you remember something about butterflies and stag...

Journal Article

The Early Years: Air Is Not Nothing

Children usually begin to understand that a substance called air is all around us after age three, but they don’t grasp that air is matter until age five, or even older. They may learn that “air is a gas” but have difficulty naming the substanc...

Journal Article

Perspectives: Using Analogies in Elementary Science

Using analogies in science classrooms helps students make connections between everyday life and the concepts we are trying to teach. Analogies help students form a bridge between their existing knowledge and new knowledge. Humans use analogical reaso...

Journal Article

Multiple Pedagogical Reforms Implemented in a University Science Class to Address Diverse Learning Styles

In an attempt to increase student success in the physical sciences, the authors implemented a system of multiple education reforms in their general chemistry courses to reach diverse learning styles. Results from the study indicated that the reforms ...

Journal Article

The Sport-Utility Vehicle: Debating Fuel-Economy Standards in Thermodynamics

This paper describes a debate about national fuel-economy standards for sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) used as a foundation for exploring a public policy issue in the physical science classroom. The subject of automobile fuel economy benefits from a f...

Journal Article

Using Science Popularizations to Promote Learner-Centered Teaching

This article attempts to evaluate why popularizations seem to generate positive reactions from learners and why the authors find themselves using popularizations more and more frequently. In doing a retrospective analysis, the authors have drawn on t...

Journal Article

Editor’s Note: States of Matter

There is a common misunderstanding of chemicals and chemistry. Chemicals are “bad.” Chemists are a nerdy set in the same category as those zany physicists, except that chemists work with more dangerous materials—“chemicals.” A change in att...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Environmental Service Learning—The Clean Air Zone Service Learning Project

In September 2006, the Maine Green Schools’ facilitators, consisting of environmental specialists from Maine’s Department of Environmental Protection and Energy Education Program, kicked off the Clean Air Zone Service Learning Project, a campaign...

Journal Article

Favorite Demonstration: Taking Poetic License With Science Instruction

The intersection of science and poetry is, of course, not new. Mixing art into science is a useful pedagogical tool, provided that students are prepared for a novel activity. In the activity described here, poetry and marine ecology are intertwined t...

Journal Article

Every Day Science: December 2008

This monthly feature contains facts and challenges for the science explorer. ...

Journal Article

The Prepared Practitioner: Making Inquiry Successful

In general, moving from structured to guided to open inquiry means increasing student thinking and responsibility—at the highest level, students come up with questions to investigate, figure out how to answer those questions, decide what to observe...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: School yard geology

“Can we break rocks again today?” This statement is typical of the excitement students show for identifying rock types after they apply their rock identification knowledge to the geology in the school yard. Many school yards, although bulldozed d...

Journal Article

Teaching Through Trade Books: The Wonder of Water

Water is an extraordinary substance that we often take for granted. Not only is it what makes our planet uniquely habitable, water is the only substance on Earth that naturally occurs in three different forms. In this month’s column, students will ...

Journal Article

The Art of Physics

The algebraic concepts and major ideas that govern Newton’s laws of motion can often be a challenge for the majority of ninth-grade students. Therefore, to make learning these concepts less task-oriented and more enjoyable, the author developed les...

Journal Article

Safer Science: Safer Administrative Procedures

How often are your eyewash stations flushed? Do all of your school’s science labs have a direct line of communication with the front office and outside support officials? These and other questions are the focus of what the Occupational Health and S...

Journal Article

Scope on Safety: Flame Tests—A Burning Safety Issue

Flame-test demonstrations are conducted annually in middle and high school science labs across the country. The purpose of the flame test is to help identify an unknown metal or metalloid ion based on a characteristic color the salt produces in a fla...

Journal Article

Science Shorts: Encouraging Visual Literacy

When someone asks you about the solar system or the water cycle, what pops into your mind? Chances are it’s a diagram. Powerful images like these help us understand, communicate, and remember important concepts in science. Learning how to read them...

Journal Article

Editor’s Corner: Doing Science With PBS

Project-based science (PBS) is finding a place in more and more secondary school science programs as teachers discover its power to engage students and develop critical-thinking skills. PBS is firmly rooted in constructivism—the idea that individua...

Journal Article

The Driving Question Board

“It was helpful to keep track of questions we had at the beginning so we knew what we were trying to find out.” With these words, a student described the value of using a Driving Question Board (DQB) in a project-based science (PBS) unit. This i...