All Resources

Journal Article

After the Bell: On the road science

Ask students about summer travel plans, then bring out the classroom globe or world map to find the places they name. You can deepen the texture of students' vacations by exploring the science contexts of their travels. ...

Journal Article

Research and Teaching: Student Attitudes and Recommendations on Active Learning

A freshman student surveyed her peers seeking their opinions, attitudes, and recommendations regarding their experiences in a large, active-learning biology course. The results were mixed—disappointing in some respects but encouraging in others. Se...

Journal Article

Inquiry Made Easy

While working with classroom teachers, the author developed a “doable” format for inquiry. This format emphasizes using a question wheel as a tool to help students identify independent and dependent variables that drive the underlying structure i...

Journal Article

An In-Depth Exploration of Karst

Exploring the fragile environment of Karst enables students to examine how Earth systems interact over time to create the spectacular landscape features and unique watersheds of Karst regions. It also will help students appreciate how knowledge of Ea...

Journal Article

Commentary: Go for the grants

An opinion piece about grant seeking and the success achieved with projects relying on collaboration and funds from outside the normal school parameters....

Journal Article

Grassroots Environmentalism: Promoting inquiry-based learning through an outdoor education program

Students of the Riverside Military Academy (RMA) came up with the idea of starting a grassroots environmental club and within a year had 50 members. This article explains how they began their focus and misson by becoming members of the Adopt-A-Stream...

Journal Article

Evidence from Apollo: How science teachers can show students that humans have landed on the Moon

Did we really land on the Moon? How do we know? The "conspiracy theory" which says that astronauts did not land on the Moon is largely based on photographic evidence and does not mention the samples brought back from the Moon. This activity examines ...

Journal Article

Customized Internet Assessments

Online assessments, one area of Internet technology that educators are still trying to develop, can involve complicated programming beyond the reach of many instructors. This article describes a program that enables instructors to create their own on...

Journal Article

Building Energy Efficiency: Energy auditing allows students to work with the community and learn new technology

The author developed a project-based curriculum called the "EnergyNet Energy Audit Project," to teach students about energy. Students look for wasted energy—energy being consumed without benefit to people—in a building and find ways to reduce th...

Journal Article

Teaching Effective Scientific Writing

In an extension of the preceding article, which describes a Towson University course that teaches students to analyze scientific information, this article summarizes the guidelines necessary for students to follow to improve their writing and offers ...

Journal Article

A Beach in Your Classroom

Combining biology, geology, mathematics, geography, and language arts, this activity encourages students to use the scientific method to solve a realistic problem encountered by a fictional field paleontologist. Students learn about the principles of...

Journal Article

Our Growing Planet

Children are naturally curious and passionate about taking care of the world around them. To capitalize on these interests, the unit described in this article was the result of a schoolwide theme entitled People and the Planet (Wasserman 1996). The u...

Journal Article

Integrating Pharmacology into the Organic Chemistry Course

Many nonchemistry majors are unaware of the unity between chemistry and biology and tend to separate the two disciplines conceptually. In a course designed to emphasize health-related issues using a pharmacological approach, students gained a much be...

Journal Article

Analyzing and Communicating Scientific Information

Using collaborative techniques, case studies, and extensive assessment, students in the Towson Transition Course at Towson University learned to access, evaluate, and communicate scientific information. A statistically significant increase in the ave...

Journal Article

Students See the Light: Investigating luminescence and incandescence through a three-part learning cycle

The difference between luminescence and incandescence seem simple enough concepts to teach. But to help students develop conceptual understanding, this article features activities from PRISMS (Physics Resources and Instructional Strategies for Motiva...

Journal Article

Idea Bank: Tips and techniques for creative teaching

The Idea Bank provides tips and techniques for creative teaching, in about 1,000 words. This month’s Idea Bank features creative teaching techniques for introducing students to the vast amount of knowledge in the periodic table of elements and an a...

Journal Article

Reflections on Earth—Remote-Sensing Research from Your Classroom

The Smithsonian Institution, with support from Honda, has developed a program entitled Reflections on Earth to provide resources for remote-sensing education. Through this program, teachers and students have access to basic information and instructio...

Journal Article

The Acadian Dikes

Technology permeates today’s society, but history also contains rich examples of technology as “a way of adapting.” The Egyptians’ approach to building pyramids, the construction of the Great Wall of China; world-wide canal systems; the desig...

Journal Article

Online Concept Maps: Enhancing collaborative learning by using technology with concept maps

In the early 1990s, the University of West Florida and IBM Latin America investigated establishing telecommunication links among schools. This arrangement—Project Quorum—included public and private schools throughout Latin America from Chile to M...

Journal Article

Adding Math to Biology: Teaching the mathematical basis of evolutionary biology

Without a mathematical understanding of evolutionary theory, we leave students defenseless against shallow arguments and pseudoscience. In this activity, students study normal variation in coral size, and to do the exercise teachers only need relativ...

Journal Article

Examining Language To Capture Scientific Understandings: The Case of the Water Cycle

As teachers of science, we need to keep in mind that thought and language are intricately related. Linguistic approximations, errors, and misses may be useful windows into our children’s developing thoughts and conceptions. Fostering more different...

Journal Article

Commentary: Matchmaker, Matchmaker

An opinion piece about matching and how the pleasure of matching can be found in science class....

Journal Article

Editor's Corner: Convention Fever

The Science Teacher’s editor shares thoughts on the current issue....

Journal Article

Skeptical Science: Teaching students how to critically evaluate unusual claims

Should science teachers discuss the legitimacy of astrology, extrasensory perception (ESP), UFOs, touch therapy, cloning dinosaurs, or any other unusual claims in the classroom? If so, can they examine the claims with students in a way that encourage...

Journal Article

Games Students Play: Teaming up in physics class leads to cooperative learning

The case for motivating students through cooperative learning has been made and supported throughout the last two decades. Two well-known cooperative learning techniques—Student Teams-Achievement Divisions (STAD) and Teams-Games-Tournament (TGT)—...

Journal Article

Project Reptile!

Good teachers continually plan learning experiences to help young children make connections within and among areas of study (Zemelman, Daniel, and Hyde 1998). Integrating curriculum is important in helping children make these connections. Class proje...

Journal Article

When a Hypothesis is <em>Not</em> an Educated Guess

The terms prediction and hypothesis are often used interchangeably, yet one term means to think about what might happen and the other means to think about why something will happen. Misuse of these terms may deprive students of the opportunity to thi...

Journal Article

Dissect Your Squid and Eat It Too!

Studying an organism that lives in the ocean lends itself to many multidisciplinary studies, such as writing poetry about sea creatures, graphing fish harvests, and learning about cultures that depend heavily on the sea. As part of a study about cora...