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Book Chapter
Advocacy and the Planning Process
Science educators believe that students construct their knowledge of the natural world best in safe, secure, and stimulating learning environments. In order to achieve these goals, teachers, researchers, and planners must become advocates for the sch...
Book Chapter
Current Trends and Future Directions in Science Education: Breaking Down the Walls
The simplest educational concept—and perhaps the most significant—to consider in designing tomorrow’s science programs is inquiry. In keeping with the Standards’ strong emphasis on inquiry-based programs, students increasingly will be explori...
Book Chapter
In order for students to inquire confidently, we must create safe classroom environments. Safety is not just a set of rules but a state of mind, and perhaps, most importantly, it is an attitude and a set of skills that carry over into a students’ d...
Book Chapter
Designing Facilities for the Middle School (6-8)
A high-quality middle school science program requires science classrooms with safe, well-designed laboratory space, and school designers must consider the distance students will have to travel to these classes. Trying to balance high quality science ...
Book Chapter
Designing Facilities for the High School (9-12)
When we participate in a school building program, we create learning environments that will last for many decades. So a major principle of good science facilities planning is to avoid building for a single curricular model. Since continued change in ...
Book Chapter
While everyone in a school community should share responsibility for the “greening” of a school, it is often the science teachers who make the best use of these facilities, basing their lessons on the components of a green school that have been b...
Book Chapter
A periodic table on the ceiling of a chemistry lab/classroom, footprints and fossils of amphibians and animals in a courtyard sidewalk, a 60-foot slinky suspended from the ceiling, and a tessellation pattern in the floor tile extend science learning ...
Book Chapter
We say it often, and the phrase appears in the National Science Education Standards and many state and local documents as well. “All students should have opportunities in science.” But that vision is harder to achieve in practice. It is especiall...
Book Chapter
Imagine metal eyeglass frames that you can roll in a ball, only to watch it uncoil back to its original shape! How can an inanimate object, such as metal, do such a thing? There is a metal alloy that can do just that and it’s one of the many discov...
Book Chapter
Socks that don’t stink, graffiti-resistant paint, windows and sunscreen that reject UV rays… that’s nanotechnology. Students will learn about some of the latest inventions using nanotechnology by exploring actual products of nanotechnology rese...
Book Chapter
Nanotechnology has opened the door for medical applications that work at the molecular level to diagnose, treat, and prevent disease. This investigation models one approach to treating cancer that uses gold nanoshells to locate and destroy cancer. St...
Book Chapter
Building Small: Nano Inventions
Just as cells were discovered with early light microscopes and Saturn’s rings by the first telescopes, the nanoscale world has emerged due to new tools such as the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM). As a result of being able to build atom by atom a who...
Book Chapter
Too Little Privacy: Ethics of Nanotechnology
Advances in nanotechnology allow us to create unique and tiny labels for manufactured materials, create tiny sensors that can detect the presence of specific molecules, and make machines that are so small they can work invisibly. Through a series of ...
Book Chapter
Just how big is a billion? How tiny is a nanometer? Five hands-on inquiry activities are presented that use measurement and calculations to help students visualize one billion. Students develop mental anchors or references to use when conceptualizing...
Book Chapter
Promise or Peril: Nanotechnology and the Environment
Nanoscience research has made great strides in recent years in areas such as nanomaterials and drug delivery. This success has kindled hope for exciting technological breakthroughs in the near future in areas ranging from new cures for cancer therapi...
Book Chapter
How do you get students to understand a number as small as one-billionth? Through a hands-on dilution activity using food coloring, students will learn about parts per billion. A matching card game helps students further understand one-billionth by g...
Book Chapter
Advances in nanotechnology are due in part to the unique structure and properties of carbon nanotubes and buckyballs. These unusual structures are being studied for their potential use as vehicles for drug delivery, to strengthen materials, and as mi...
Book Chapter
Biological Nanomachines: Viruses
Although nanotechnology is a new and emerging field, nanoscale structures are not new. Small molecules such as water, large molecules such as proteins, and larger, more complex objects such as viruses and nanotubes are naturally occurring and exist a...
Book Chapter
What’s In Your Bag? Investigating the Unknown
In nanoscience, like all scientific endeavors, asking the right questions is a vital part of progress. Our ability to observe how things work at the nanoscale is very limited. We need the use of very advanced microscope technologies as well as other ...
Book Chapter
Nanomagnets: Fun with Ferrofluid
Ferrofluid provides an easy opportunity to introduce students to the fascinating properties of the nanoscale. It is essentially a liquid magnet made of nanosized magnetic particles suspended in water or oil. Not only does it demonstrate the strange a...
Book Chapter
Imagine you could build an object that is a billion times smaller than a meter. What would you build? An entire new field has emerged as a result of a new generation of microscopes that allows scientists to investigate the world at the tiniest of sca...
Book Chapter
It’s a Small World After All: Nanofabric
Nanotechnology is producing a variety of new materials we use in our everyday lives. One such development is the latest stain-resistant fabric. This inquiry activity gives students the opportunity to explore and discover unique nanoscale properties o...
Book Chapter
Becoming a Teacher Researcher: Giving Space, Finding Space
Christopher Horne is a teacher specialist for elementary science for Frederick County, Maryland, public schools and an adjunct professor in the education department at Mount Saint Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He is pursuing a doctoral...
Book Chapter
Teachers Supporting Teachers in Learning
Diantha Lay is principal of an elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland. When she wrote this chapter, she was just starting a new position for the county as a staff development teacher. Earlier she had been a second- and a fourth-grade teache...
Book Chapter
TEAM Connections: Four Teachers’ Journeys Into Action Research
Judy Fix, Norma Fletcher, Dianne Johnson, and Janet Siulc—a group of teachers in the Buffalo Public School District—wondered what they could do that would go beyond talk and speculation about their teaching practices. They wanted to take action i...
Book Chapter
Learning About Motion: Fun for All
Deborah Roberts is a fifth-grade teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. At the time she wrote this chapter, she was a middle-school science teacher in a high-poverty suburban school in Maryland. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the University ...
Book Chapter
Reflections on Fostering Teacher Inquiries Into Science Learning and Teaching
Emily van Zee is an associate professor of science education at Oregon State University and co-organizer of Teacher Researcher Day at National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) national conferences. She has been a middle school science teacher, sco...
Book Chapter
Reading, Writing, Comprehension, and Confidence—Achieved in Science Contexts
When Elizabeth Kline wrote this, she was a fifth-grade teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland. A desire to integrate scientific concepts in a curriculum dominated by reading, writing, and mathematics motivated her to change the way she taught ...
Book Chapter
Fourth-Grade Scientists Investigate Electric Circuits
Trisha Kagey Boswell is a third-grade teacher at an elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland, where she has taught for eight years. Her school is an art-integrated magnet school. When she wrote this chapter, she was a first-year teacher, teac...
Book Chapter
Ellen Franz is a teacher at an elementary school in the Sausalito Marin City School District, a small district just north of San Francisco. When she wrote this poem, she was teaching primary grades in a midsized urban school district and had been in ...
Book Chapter
When students Don’t Talk: Searching for Reasons
Mary Bell has taught for 23 years in a large suburban school district near Washington, DC. As an elementary special education and Reading Recovery teacher, she cotaught reading, science, and math as part of an inclusion model. Currently, she is worki...
Book Chapter
Evolving Ethical Perspectives in an Eighth-Grade Science Classroom
Matthew Ronfeldt’s dissertation as a doctoral candidate in Curriculum and Teacher Education at Stanford University is a crossprofessional study of how professional education supports novice teachers and clinical psychologists in adapting to their n...
Book Chapter
Student Teaching as Collaboration
For teachers who are trying to understand what their students think and how they feel, data can include notes found on the floor after class, the letters they as teachers write to their students, and the e-mails they send each other as they puzzle ou...
Book Chapter
Collaborative Conversations and Intentional Reflections on Teaching and Learning Physics
Dorothy Simpson taught mathematics for 15 years before she started teaching physics at Mercer Island High School near Seattle. Now retired, she is serving as a volunteer at a local elementary school with special interest in providing support for the ...
Book Chapter
In some ways, the laboratory safety standards may seem at odds with science laboratory curriculum expectations in an environment attempting to provide for full inclusion of all students. Clearly, not all students will be able to be fully mainstreamed...
Book Chapter
Learners explore the invention process by learning about inventions throughout history and how inventions fill needs or wants, by improving existing inventions, and by keeping a toy invention journal. They further their understandings of the risks an...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about seeds. It specifically probes to find out if students recognize that a seed has needs, similar to other organisms that allow it to develop into the next stage of its life cycle...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about plant growth. It specifically probes to find out if students think plants only grow if they are exposed to light....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about food and plants. The probe is designed to reveal whether students use a biological concept of food to identify what plants use for food....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about transformation of matter. The probe is designed to reveal whether students recognize that a gas from the air (carbon dioxide) is combined with water and transformed into the ne...