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Book Chapter
Essay: Programs for Teaching English Language Learners
Today's K-12 American classrooms are rich with students from families of diverse cultural, socioeconomic, and linguistic backgrounds. An increasingly important dimension of diversity in contemporary schools is language and, in particular, the relativ...
Book Chapter
A Teacher's Perspective: Programs for Teaching English Language Learners
In their essay, “Programs for Teaching English Language Learners,” page 129, Fred Genesee and Donna Christian take an in-depth look at some of the most frequently used educational approaches for teaching students who are learning English. They de...
Book Chapter
Essay: Creating Culturally Responsive Learning Communities
The population of the United States is more ethnically and racially diverse than ever, a fact particularly evident among young and school-age children. This presents today’s elementary schools—including teachers, administrators, and policy makers...
Book Chapter
A Teacher's Perspective: Creating Culturally Responsive Learning Communities
In their essay, “Creating Culturally Responsive Learning Communities,” page 151, Eugene García and Okhee Lee begin with the idea that human beings construct knowledge by “applying knowledge of previous concepts to the new information that is p...
Book Chapter
Essay: What Is Equity in Science Education?
Concerns about equity often influence and drive decision making by educators and policy makers. How do these concerns—and different understandings of equity itself—affect the quality and form of science instruction available for English language ...
Book Chapter
A Teacher's Perspective: What Is Equity in Science Education?
In his essay, “What is Equity in Science Education?,” page 167, Walter Secada challenges our understanding of equity by raising questions about how different meanings of equity can influence science education for English language learners. He hig...
Book Chapter
Conclusion: Reconceptualizing Diversity in the Science Classroom
This book has discussed steps teachers can take toward reconceptualizing diversity as an intellectual strength in the science classroom. By way of closing, the authors outline a path for those interested in pushing their practice further. It involves...
Book Chapter
Essay: Using Students' Conversational Style
In the United States, science instruction is based on an idealized, Western view of scientific practice and on the language practices of a middle-class population. Unbeknownst to teachers, this orientation ignores much of the knowledge and experience...
Book Chapter
Essay: Encouraging students' Imagination
How do scientists use their imaginations in their daily work and thinking? Is there a place for imagination in the science classroom? This essay explores the role that imagination plays in the intellectual work of science. Examples from professional ...
Book Chapter
Essay: Using Everyday Experience to Teach Science
How does everyday experience function in science learning and teaching? Is everyday experience a source of student misconceptions? Or is it an essential foundation of science learning? This essay examines everyday experience and its importance for al...
Book Chapter
A Teacher's Perspective: Using Students' Experience to Understand Science
Can students use their knowledge of natural phenomena to make sense of science in school? How can teachers use this knowledge to construct meaning in the classroom? Renote Jean-François, an English-as-a-second-language and literacy teacher in the Sh...
Book Chapter
Essay: What Is Academic Language?
When children learn science in school, they are learning both new ways of thinking about the world and new ways of using language to make meaning. This essay examines some characteristic ways in which academic styles of language are used in the scien...
Book Chapter
Essay: What Is the Vocabulary of Science?
What is the nature of the vocabulary words that children need to know to do well in science? How and where might children learn these words? In this essay, the authors explore these questions about the teaching and learning of the words of science. T...
Book Chapter
What can a teacher do when she realizes that she has used an apparently simple word like think in a way that some students find strange? This happened in Suzanne Pothier’s classroom of first and second graders. She decided to take up the problem a...
Book Chapter
The Triad Story—A Science Education Community Navigating Gender Equity
In chapter 1, Triad and the Framework are described from a community perspective. In chapter 2, the authors describe how the Framework evolved from a more theoretical standpoint. They introduce its anatomy and initiate a more detailed discussion of i...
Book Chapter
The Nature of Science and Science Inquiry
In a knowledge-centered science classroom, students work to answer scientifically oriented questions by creating explanations based on evidence. This approach, called science inquiry, is how science is conducted. It creates a learning environment tha...
Book Chapter
Youth Leadership at The Franklin Institute: What Happened When the Grant Ran Out
The Franklin Institute's Center for Innovation in Science Learning develops model programs for the K-12 science education community, both inside and outside the Museum walls. This chapter profiles the Institute's Partnership for Achieving Careers in ...
Book Chapter
Science Career Ladder at the NY Hall of Science: Youth Facilitators as Agents of Inquiry
The New York Hall of Science is New York City’s hands-on science and technology center, with more than 400 interactive exhibits exploring physics, chemistry, and biology. The Hall also creates and presents demonstrations and programs for students a...
Book Chapter
A Burger, a Beer… and a Side of Science
Science Cafés are part of a unique national informal education outreach initiative for NOVA ScienceNow, a PBS science series. The project's special focus is to reach new audiences—both on air and off—especially those younger than traditional PBS...
Book Chapter
The Museum Institute for Teaching Science (MITS) promotes the teaching of participatory, hands-on and minds-on, inquiry-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) at the K-8 grade levels, through collaboration among informal scien...
Book Chapter
Discovery Center at Murfree Springs, a hands-on museum and environmental education center, has created a science tour for grades preK-2, called “Splash, Flash, Crank, Slide, Alive Tour,” which is based on the National Science Education Standards....
Book Chapter
Grands Are Grand is a monthly informal science program for children ages 3-5 and their grandparents offered by the North Museum of Natural History & Science in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The lessons include a wide variety of touchable, visual, and aud...
Book Chapter
FAMILY MATH and Science Education: A Natural Attraction
The Lawrence Hall of Science is a resource center for science and mathematics education and a public science center with exciting hands-on experiences for learners of all ages. One of its programs, FAMILY MATH, is built on the belief that children c...
Book Chapter
Informal education venues, by their very definition, are predisposed to the successful implementation of the More Emphasis conditions of the National Science Educations Standards (NSES), and Mote Marine Laboratory is no exception to this trend. At Mo...
Book Chapter
The Body of Evidence: COSI’s In Depth: Autopsy Videoconference Program
The Center of Science and Industry’s (COSI) Electron Education program, In Depth: Autopsy, allows students to see and participate in an autopsy as much as possible, given the limits of videoconference technologies. The program puts anatomy, physiol...
Book Chapter
Citizen Science at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology is an international center for the study, appreciation, and conservation of birds located on a 200-acre wildlife sanctuary in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1915 by Arthur A. Allen, the world’s first professor of ornith...
Book Chapter
Can an Informal Science Institution Really Play the Key Role in K–12 Science Education Reform?
The Washington State LASER (Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform) program is under the leadership of the Pacific Science Center, an informal, nonprofit science institution, dedicated to increasing the public’s understanding and apprec...
Book Chapter
Advancing the NSES Vision through Informal Science Education
Despite originally being almost exclusively focused on the school context, the National Science Education Standards (NSES) emerged as an amazingly relevant document for the informal context as well. All four of the Standards—Teaching Standards, Con...
Book Chapter
Inquiry Is Taking Flight Through Project Butterfly WINGS
Project Butterfly WINGS (Winning Investigative Network for Great Science) is designed to foster adolescents' interest, understanding, and long-term involvement in science, as well as promote positive youth development. Through WINGS, students form a ...
Book Chapter
Curious Scientific Investigators Solve Museum Mysteries
The Children's Museum of Indianapolis has developed the Curious Scientific Investigators (CSI) program, which mixes the best the Museum has to offer with classroom instruction. Therefore, CSI’s vision is to support learning by all members of a clas...
Book Chapter
The Ocean Institute (OI) is dedicated to increasing awareness and understanding of the ocean environment. Its 9-week Weather & Water program is intended to interface the very frontier of ocean science with the needs of fifth-grade teachers and classr...
Book Chapter
Omaha’s Henry Doorly Zoo Academy: Where Science Education Comes to Life!
Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo has become a leader in both informal and formal science education. Its Zoo Academy is one example of an effective nontraditional teaching model for science education. The academy has become an excellent work-based learning mo...
Book Chapter
Alternative Conceptions: New Directions and Exemplars in College Science Education Research
The most useful science education research for college science teachers is theory based and includes data collected from studies with college students, along with a discussion of the implications for teaching. In this chapter, the authors use example...
Journal Article
Integrating a Single Tablet PC in Chemistry, Engineering, and Physics Courses
A tablet PC is a versatile computer that combines the computing power of a notebook with the pen functionality of a PDA (Cox and Rogers 2005b). The authors adopted tablet PC technology in order to improve the process and product of the lecture format...
Journal Article
GeoJourney is an interdisciplinary field trip in geology, Native American studies, and environmental studies designed for introductory-level undergraduates. The program travels 23,345 kilometers by van to national parks, industrial sites, museums, an...
Journal Article
This month, Mercury will start becoming visible over the western horizon shortly after sunset. If you have students observe Mercury, they should do so at approximately the same time for each observation. During the first half of the month, Mercury wi...
eBook
Teaching Science to English Language Learners: Building on Students’ Strengths (e-book)
Can a student’s cultural background support learning in science? Or is concentrating on the specialized vocabulary of science the best way to help English language learners learn science? This book addresses these and other pressing questions you ...
Journal Article
Sponsored by NASA and the JASON Education Foundation, the remote Sensing Earth Science Teacher Education Program (RSESTeP) trains teachers to use state-of-the art remote-sensing technology with the idea that participants bring back what they learn an...
Journal Article
Editor’s Corner: Earth in the Balance
The study of Earth science is sometimes overlooked in our high school science curriculums. In the rush to get through the sequence of biology-chemistry-physics and on to advanced level or AP courses, students and their parents sometimes regard Earth ...
Journal Article
Speaker Perceptions of Communicative Effectiveness: Conversational Analysis of Student-Teacher Talk
This study examines verbal behavior in student-teacher talk and alignment of perceptions of communication effectiveness. Heightened awareness of conversational patterns is more productive in the learning environment than the rote use of discourse mar...