All Resources

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Field Journals—Bringing the past to life

In this activity, students travel back in time as explorers to collect scientific information on plant and animal life during various geological eras. The author uses the book, The Deep Time Diaries as way to bring literature into the science classro...

Journal Article

Media and Science: Developing Skepticism and Critical Thinking

Science lessons can encourage students to view data with a scientists' skeptical eye—especially now that so much unrefereed information is online, in advertising, and in other media sources. In developing the skills of media literacy as part of sci...

Journal Article

The Thinking Machine: A Physical Science Project

Science projects can be a wonderful opportunity for learning and creativity, or a gigantic headache for teachers. After several years of implementation, experience, and revision, the author has put together a fun and engaging project centered on mach...

Journal Article

The Early Years: The Story of Corn

Corn is an interesting subject for young children to explore because it grows ears in many forms, the seeds are easy to see and handle, and it is familiar to most children in one food product or another. Therefore, science activities about corn are e...

Journal Article

The Prepared Practitioner: What Is an Experiment?

When asked what scientists do, people generally respond with “experiments.” We often base critical decisions, such as those related to our personal health, on the results of scientists’ experiments. But what really is involved in how scientists...

Journal Article

Connections Charts and Book Talk Groups

Making connections is always an important task for teachers. Science teachers are encouraged to connect new learning with students’ prior knowledge, learning with student interests, learning with cultural experiences, and classroom activities acros...

Journal Article

Planning for Success

Inquiry, a prominent feature of the National Science Education Standards, is the instructional keystone that connects doing and learning science (NRC 2000). Because it is integral to the Standards, inquiry is also emphasized in science curriculum sta...

Journal Article

The Great Dinosaur Feud: Science Against All Odds

In the 19th century, the race to uncover dinosaur fossils and name new dinosaur species inspired two rival scientists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, to behave in ways that were the antithesis of scientific methods. Subterfuge, theft,...

Journal Article

Worms Out of This World!

Many people think of earthworms as small, slimy creatures that belong in the garden. To teachers, however, earthworms are delicate animals that can help young students develop important science-process skills such as observation and data collection. ...

Journal Article

The Benefits of Scientific Modeling

When students are engaged in scientific modeling, they are able to notice patterns and develop and revise representations that become useful models to predict and explain—making their own scientific knowledge stronger, helping them to think critica...

Journal Article

A Useful Laboratory Tool

Recently, a high school Science Club generated a large number of questions involving temperature. Therefore, they decided to construct a thermal gradient apparatus in order to conduct a wide range of experiments beyond the standard “cookbook” lab...

Journal Article

The Better Boat Challenge

“On your mark, get set, go!” Elementary students love to hear these words as they participate in the annual Third Grade Better Boat Challenge. This highly motivational project started a few years ago as the author was developing the third-grade s...

Journal Article

The 23rd Annual Consortium of Geologists

Today’s scientific theories are the result of a long collaborative process, sometimes over centuries, among many different scientists from various parts of the world. To communicate this concept to middle school students and introduce them to the t...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: When do girls lose interest in math and science?

To determine when girls lose interest in math and science, the authors surveyed female students in grades 4 through 8 in several school districts in southwestern Ohio to try to answer three questions: (1) Do girls stop liking science? If so, at which...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Chemical weathering—Where did the rocks go?

This lesson is part of a larger Earth science unit that combines the concepts of the rock cycle and the water cycle and how they interact to change landforms. The authors refer to it as the “make it and then break it” unit. They spend half the un...

Journal Article

After the Bell: Developing an awareness of pet stewardship

Given the commonness of pets in communities throughout the United States, Canada, and Australia, among other countries, pet stewardship should be a natural topic of study for the integration of science, mathematics, and technology. Therefore, the ter...

Journal Article

The Sea Ice Board Game

The National Science Foundation-funded Arctic Climate Modeling Program (ACMP) provides “curriculum resource-based professional development” materials that combine current science information with practical classroom instruction embedded with “b...

Journal Article

Networking Antarctic Research Discoveries to a Science Classroom

In 2006, a unique scenario transported eighth-grade Earth science students from the classroom into the cold, dry, pristine surroundings of Antarctica. The mission was to expose the students to hands-on science using satellite telephones, Contact 3.0 ...

Journal Article

Caught in Their Tracks

By allowing students to develop and conduct research on biological or environmental problems they identify themselves, students gain a higher level of understanding and appreciation for science. To this end, teachers should incorporate student-driven...

Journal Article

When Things Go Wrong—The results Can Turn Out Right

For several years, the author’s fifth-grade students raised and observed plants, kept journals, and analyzed the functions of the parts of a plant. But this year, a near disaster taught her a lesson and increased the value of the activity for her s...

Journal Article

Health Wise: October 2008

One of my students recently became a vegetarian. How is this different from being a vegan, and what can she do to continue getting the nutrients she needs? ...

Journal Article

Science Shorts: Experimental Error

One of the most challenging components of science inquiry is getting students to understand the fundamentally important concept of experimental error. While this concept can be tricky for children, there are straightforward lessons that can go a long...

Journal Article

Editor’s Roundtable: Sculpting the Earth’s surface

Our students need to know about the structure of the Earth and about the geological processes that shape its surface—both the long-term and the everyday processes, the abrupt shifts of faults, the sustained movements of tectonic plates, and slow up...

Journal Article

PREPping Students for Authentic Science

In this article, the authors describe a large-scale research collaboration, the Partnership for Research and Education in Plants (PREP), which has capitalized on publicly available databases that contain massive amounts of biological information; sto...

Journal Article

Scope on Safety: Safety and liability

In order to provide a level of awareness relative to liability, the NSTA Board charged a committee with the task of rewriting the NSTA Position Statement on Liability of Science Educators for Laboratory Safety. This article outlines four basic questi...

Book Chapter

Climate and Life

Climate is the state of the atmosphere over years or decades. Although climate is commonly defined as “average weather,” the term encompasses more than a simple mean. It also refers to variability, seasonality, and extremes in climate elements su...

Book Chapter

Cruel, Cruel Summer

Scientists expect that a warmer climate will cause more severe, more frequent, and longer heat waves. Heat waves pose a significant health risk to everyone, but especially to poor, elderly, and chronically ill individuals. In this open-ended inquiry,...

Book Chapter

Earth’s Changing Climate

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius published the first model of the effects of industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) on Earth’s climate. Since the days of Arrhenius, scientists have moved from pencils to supercomputers. Calculations take hours or days instead of ...

Book Chapter

Biological Effects of Climate Change

How important is climate change—something that has occurred throughout Earth’s history? Can ecosystems tolerate the magnitude and rate of future change? How will other conservation threats interact with climate change? How likely are widespread e...

Book Chapter

Quick Guide to Climate

This “Quick Guide to Climate” is a brief, student-friendly overview of Chapters 1 through 3. The overview is suitable either for introducing climate change to your students or for reviewing key concepts at the end of a unit. You can also use the ...

Book Chapter

Population Peril

Rising air temperatures have changed the extent and timing of sea ice formation in the Arctic, forcing some polar bear populations to go longer each year without food. In this activity, students assume the role of graduate students advising an intern...

Book Chapter

Carrion: It’s What’s for Dinner

The restoration of wolves to Yellowstone National Park after a 70-year absence created a natural experiment on the ecological effects of top predators. In this activity, students use mathematical models to explore how carrion from wolf kills can redu...