All Resources

Journal Article

A Week for Space

Space Week focuses on concepts that enable students to make concrete observations in the early grades (K—2) and move to concepts that help students develop their internet research and writing skills in middle and upper grades (Grades 3—5), and cu...

Journal Article

Bringing Moon Phases Down to Earth

Teaching astronomy concepts to elementary students does not have to be complicated or require expensive materials. As a teacher resource agent for the American Astronomical Society and through involvement with other science- or astronomy-related orga...

Journal Article

Developing the Essential Features of Inquiry

This lesson can be used at the beginning of the year to teach students how to conduct inquiries using the essential features described in Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996). The lesson is divided into several activities w...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: How many lefties in our classroom?

Probability sampling is an interdisciplinary math and science skill that often serves as the precursor to conducting scientific research. This article describes a lesson that uses probability sampling to allow middle school students to investigate so...

Journal Article

Science Shorts: Here Comes the Sun

Time is an abstract concept for many elementary students. Add to that the idea that the position of the objects in the sky—Sun, Moon, etc.—changes over the course of the day, and you have a mix ripe for confusion and potential misconceptions. In ...

Journal Article

Science 101: An Integrated, Inquiry-Oriented Science Course for Education Majors

Science 101 was designed by a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional team, with leadership from the Departments of Biology and Teacher Education, and participation by faculty in the Departments of Chemistry, Physics, and Mathematics, the College of E...

Journal Article

Science 101: How do we know the universe is expanding, and what exactly does that mean?

Unless you’ve been hiding out in a cave for the last 20 years, you’ve heard that the universe is expanding and it started with a big bang. To put an expanding universe in perspective, it helps to imagine that you live in a two-dimensional univers...

Journal Article

Commentary: The Underlying Life Lesson

Are you, as a science teacher, ever left exhausted at the end of the day wondering, “Is it really worth the effort?” After over 50 years on this Earth—the author can safely say yes, it is. However, he is not a science teacher, and this is not a...

Journal Article

Editor’s Note: New Heights

Ask five-year-olds what they want to be when they grow up and we may hear “astronaut,” “dinosaur paleontologist,” or even “princess.” Rather than repeat all of the more realistic professions surrounding them, they go with jobs that captur...

Journal Article

Bernoulli’s Principle: Science as a Human Endeavor

What do the ideas of Daniel Bernoulli—an 18th-century Swiss mathematician, physicist, natural scientist, and professor—and your students’ next landing of the space shuttle via computer simulation have in common? Because of his contribution, ref...

Journal Article

Transforming the Teaching of Science Graduate Students Through Reflection

This paper presents an assessment of a biology education seminar for science graduate students. It describes how this seminar emphasized pedagogy and reflective assignments to help students identify and explore novel instructional strategies, discove...

Journal Article

Tips for the Traveling Teacher

While the ideal situation is for all science to be taught in a properly-equipped classroom, where materials do not have to be transported from room to room, the unfortunate reality is that some teachers do have to travel. As a traveling teacher, the ...

Journal Article

No Child Left Inside

Earth Science Week (ESW) 2008 encourages people around the globe to open doors and investigate new opportunities. This year’s theme, “No Child Left Inside,” is a call to explore our natural environments. The celebration urges everyone—especia...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Caution! Scientists in the making

Equipping students with knowledge, skills, attitudes, and habits of mind necessary to design investigative questions is an essential goal for any science teacher. Just as with anything new, when students begin to design investigative questions, they ...

Journal Article

Whole-Class Inquiry Assessments

Whole-class inquiry (WCI) assessments range from challenging, paper-and-pencil puzzles to lab-based problems that require students to apply their own gathered data to a new scenario; the latter might also require students to perform a lab with new pa...

Journal Article

Safer Science: Tools for Schools Rules!

In 1995, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released the highly successful Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) Tools for Schools (TfS) program. The TfS program is an in-the-trenches approach that empowers teachers and other school employees to help ...