All Science Scope resources

Journal Article

Issues In-Depth: Advancing understanding of drug addiction and treatment

While most school districts utilize a drug abuse resistance curriculum, as science teachers, it is our responsibility to understand the science behind drug addiction in order to most effectively educate our students against drug abuse. In the last tw...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Dr. Vermeij and The Cay

As an interdisciplinary exploration, middle-level students were reading The Cay (1969) by Theodore Taylor in their English classes, honing map skills in social studies, and learning the importance of making observations in science class. Then, inspir...

Journal Article

Tread Lightly: The Truth About Science Friction

During a recent unit on characteristics of animals in different environments, “backyard safari” trips around the schoolyard provided opportunities for students to describe ways that animals are adapted to their unique environments. This led to a ...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: The Great Fakesperiment

The Great Fakesperiment is based on 10 fictitious experiment examples. These examples included a brief description of what the experiment was about, asked students to identify the independent or dependent variable, and listed possible answers. The ac...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Conceptualizing Moon Phases—Helping students learn how to learn

Helping students understand how to learn is an important goal for all subjects and levels of education. While this goal is highly regarded, promoting it is extremely difficult. Many times, we as teachers are consumed with how to better help our stude...

Journal Article

Extracting the Max From a DNA Extraction

Students of all ages get a thrill out of actually seeing clumps or strands of DNA. The Biotechnology/Bioinformatics Discovery! Project, a professional development workshop offered to science teachers, has always included a DNA-extraction activity. Ov...

Journal Article

From Aristotle to Today: Making the History and Nature of Science Relevant

Students connect to science in multiple ways. For some students, learning how real people have developed and defended their scientific ideas makes science relevant and interesting. Tracking the changes in scientific thought over time can be fascinati...

Journal Article

Green Science: Going locavore—Teaching students about the benefits of food produced locally

A term that is fairly new to the English vernacular is locavore. This term describes anyone who eats food that is grown locally. A locavore diet consists of both perishable and imperishable food that is generally produced within a 100-mile radius of ...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Seeing the world in a garden—Science and art curricula synergy

Duke Farms and Gardens, a 2,700-acre estate in Hillsborough, New Jersey, that includes a large greenhouse, was the site of a middle school field trip that provided the opportunity to highlight overlapping science and visual art curricula goals. Some...

Journal Article

Teacher’s Toolkit: How do you know if they’re getting it? Writing assessment items that reveal student understanding

Through a project funded by the National Science Foundation, Horizon Research has been developing assessment items for students (in the process, compiling item-writing principles from several sources and adding their own). In this article, the author...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Exploratory Excursions—Documenting slow changes in local parks

While hiking a local conservation property and trying to unwind after a hectic day, it dawned on the author that teaching his students about slow changes to the Earth’s surface could be as simple as a walk in the woods. Decaying stumps, ATV tracks,...

Journal Article

How Does Mechanical Weathering Change Rocks? Using Reading-to-Learn Strategies to Teach Science Content

Many teachers fall into the pattern of “assumptive teaching” (Herber 1970), assuming that other instructors will teach students the important strategies they need for learning. In this case, tools and strategies may not be taught outside of readi...

Journal Article

Seeking Other Worlds

Is Earth unique in the universe? What is a habitable planet? How abundant are habitable planets? NASA’s Kepler Mission team seeks answers to these questions. Launching in 2009, Kepler is NASA’s first mission capable of finding Earth-sized and sma...