JoinAll Resources
Book Chapter
Needs Assessment for Beginning Teacher Assistance Programs
This chapter makes several general suggestions to teams charged with developing beginning teacher assistance programs (BTAPs), then describes four specific types of needs assessment carried out in effective BTPAs—environmental needs assessment, beg...
Book Chapter
A Systematic Approach to Support Teacher Retention and Renewal
Teacher retention and renewal are critical issues facing school districts across the United States, with the need for teacher retention at a time when school districts are also facing a need for teacher renewal. It is imperative that school districts...
Book Chapter
Mentoring and Coaching for Teachers of Science: Enhancing Professional Culture
Mentor programs provide an opportunity to foster a professional culture that focuses on improving the teaching, learning, and assessing of science as well as a means to retain highly qualified new and experienced teachers. This chapter outlines key s...
Book Chapter
Personal Histories Supporting Retention of Beginning Science Teachers
Beginning science teachers enter the classroom with an early professional role identity formed from life experiences in science, education, and volunteer/work settings. These experiences, along with teachers' values and beliefs, can support new scien...
Book Chapter
The Reemerging Cycle of Teacher Supply and Demand: North Carolina Takes Action
This chapter presents a brief history of teacher shortages, particularly in the fields of science and mathematics. It describes numerous efforts by North Carolina, not only in recruiting individuals into the teaching profession but also in retaining ...
Book Chapter
Congratulations! You have secured a position to teach the fascinating world of science to middle school students! Science to young adolescents!?!?...
Book Chapter
Perhaps the most important skill a good teacher should possess is the ability to control students. A teacher who can devise fascinating and unique lesson plans for her classroom is useless if she can't get the kids to sit down and listen to her inst...
Book Chapter
Using Your Community Resources
Within the field of education, it is important for communities to take an active role in developing relationships with the local schools and learning facilities. One good reason in particular is that children and adolescents need to feel that they a...
Book Chapter
Teaming is a method of grouping students so they share the same set of teachers for their core subject areas—science, math, language arts, social studies, and sometimes physical education and health. Most often, teams are created when an entire gr...
Book Chapter
Our lives are ones of uncertainty and surprise, yin and yang existences. Some things we can control and others we are powerless to command, even with the best intentions. Teachers are not exempt from emergencies, jury duty, and illness. Luckily, m...
Book Chapter
Front-page articles in science and education periodicals and journals give voice to the growing concern that scores on nationwide science exams have either declined or, at best, have had a minute increase even after several years of pushing for bette...
Book Chapter
Whether your assigned classroom is for science labs or there is a specific lab area shared among several teachers, you need to set up properly for group experiments and other hands-on activities. There are several ways to set up lab groups in various...
Book Chapter
Cooperative Learning and Assessment
Cooperative learning in its simplest sense is two or more students working together on an assignment. In an expanded definition, cooperative learning becomes an opportunity for students to interact with one another intellectually and socially under ...
Book Chapter
Writing, as we all know, is an integral part of any discipline. And, because of the important role that writing up lab reports and research plays in the field of science, you must help your students work on writing throughout the year. This chapter...
Book Chapter
Adapting Labs and Troubleshooting
A great deal of information is available on how children learn—brain research, multiple intelligence aspects, concrete versus abstract thinking, environmental stimuli, and so on—but one key feature can be gleaned from all of the studies, and that...
Book Chapter
One common misconception in the middle school science classroom is that students magically will know how to do many of the seemingly easy tasks teachers assign. In reality, even the simple direction of using written resources to gain background info...
Book Chapter
One of the most challenging activities in the middle school science lab is taking measurements. A simple ruler can send students into a questioning mob around a teacher, not unlike a shark-feeding frenzy. Student activities that require using and r...
Book Chapter
This section includes resources that any new teacher would want to have at their fingertips. It offers reproducible lists, quizzes, and forms. These resources will assist in making the first year of teaching a smooth and successful one....
Book Chapter
This section offers practical resources that will be quite valuable during those first few months of teaching middle school science. Here you will find recipes that include salt crystals, culture medium, fun putty, and the ever-popular "oobleck". T...
Book Chapter
The Importance of Everyday Assessment
Assessment for learning is set in the context of conflicts and synergies with the other purposes of assessments. The core ideas are that it is characterized by the day-to-day use of evidence to guide students’ learning and that everyday practice mu...
Book Chapter
As a context for thinking about the claims made in this book, some of the circumstances that have influenced the demand for and character of assessment in general are noted. The argument is then made that the substantial lack of coherence in today’...
Book Chapter
Learning Through Assessment: Assessment for Learning in the Science Classroom
This chapter presents an extended example from a middle school science classroom of what assessment that supports learning looks like. In the example, the teacher models assessment for learning by talking about learning with her students; showing sam...
Book Chapter
Examining student work is an essential aspect of teaching, yet it is easy to miss opportunities to learn about how students are interpreting—or misinterpreting—the lessons we present to them. In this chapter the author shares insights concerning ...
Book Chapter
This chapter provides an overview of frameworks that teachers can use to conduct assessments of students’ engagement in scientific inquiry. The author examines two factors that are central to such assessment. One factor is the design of classroom l...
Book Chapter
Using Questioning to Assess and Foster Student Thinking
Questioning can be used to probe for understanding, to initiate inquiry, and to promote development of understanding. The results from questioning, listening, and assessment also can be used by teachers to promote their own growth as professionals. T...
Book Chapter
Involving Students in Assessment
While much of the responsibility for classroom assessment lies with teachers, students also play an important role in meaningful assessment activity. Bringing students into the assessment process is a critical dimension of facilitating student learni...
Book Chapter
Reporting Progress to Parents and Others: Beyond Grades
As science education moves increasingly in the direction of teaching to standards, teachers call for classroom assessment techniques that provide a richer source of “rigorous and wise diagnostic information.” Student-to-student comparisons and si...
Book Chapter
Working with Teachers in Assessment-Related Professional Development
Professional development related to everyday classroom interactions can require a shift in the teacher’s priorities in the classroom from a focus on managing activity and behavior to a mind-set of managing learning opportunities. This essay looks c...
Book Chapter
Reconsidering Large-Scale Assessment to Heighten Its Relevance to Learning
In contrast to classroom assessments that can provide immediate feedback in the context of ongoing instruction, large-scale assessments are necessarily broader survey instruments, administered once-per-year and standardized to ensure comparability ac...
Book Chapter
Although this terrific interdisciplinary, cooperative-learning science experience began primarily as a language arts assignment to compare the leadership skills of two fascinating men, it grew to encompass an exploration of ice's properties and taugh...
Book Chapter
At the beginning of the 21st century, education seems dominated by talk about educational outcomes and their assessment. This chapter serves to demystify these topics. This free selection includes the Preface, Table of Contents, an About the Author p...
Book Chapter
This chapter highlights documents such as the National Science Education Standards that were designed to be achievable by all students, no matter their background or characteristics. Project 2061: Science for all Americans and Project 2061: Benchmark...
Book Chapter
The scientific method not only describes inaccurately how science works, but also distorts the meaning of words such as "theory" and "law." A theory, in science, is a widely applicable explanation. A law is a generalization or pattern derived directl...
Book Chapter
General Instructional Approaches
Advocates of STS—science-technology-society—approaches believe that the science curriculum should pay special attention to science-based social issues. They envision K-12 science classes being best when focusing on the boundary between science an...
Book Chapter
This chapter presents several models of instruction from cooperative learning to inquiry-based instruction. It concludes with the 5E Model of instruction, pioneered by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS 1993....
Book Chapter
Pedagogy means teaching and teaching is what teachers do. It's a fancy word with a simple meaning. In reality, the distinction between pedagogy and curriculum can be a bit difficult because what is taught and how it is taught are deeply intertwined. ...
Book Chapter
Assessment, broadly defined, means information gathering. Grading (or evaluating) students is certainly one type of assessment. Tests, portfolios, and lab practicals are all assessment devices. However, teachers assess students in other ways. When te...
Book Chapter
The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (2002) defines “diversity” in this way: “In education, discussions about diversity involve recognizing a variety of student needs including those of ethnicity, language, socioeconomic c...
Book Chapter
As is the case with the other chapters in this book, each entry in this chapter should stand on its own. However, more than in other chapters, the ideas presented in this chapter tend to build on each other. Ideas that began with Piaget were later ch...
Book Chapter
This chapter presents research concepts featuring qualitative, quantitative, and action research. Qualitative research generally involves a researcher combining observation, interview, and analysis of various documents. Quantitative research represen...