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  • Questioning the Relationships

    Journal Article |

    Questions are powerful tools teachers can use to understand and scaffold students’ thinking (Clough 2007). However, not all questions are equally effective at eliciting students’ ideas or scaffolding their thinking. For…

  • Cultivating Collaboration

    Journal Article |

  • Mission INSPIRE

    Journal Article |

    Students with visual impairments are often the only students at their school who read braille. They often do not participate in science fairs, in some cases because of low expectations on the part of educators and in…

  • Hearing All Voices to Promote Learning Orientation and Effective Collaboration

    Journal Article |

    Motivation and collaboration intersect in important ways in a science classroom. One important motivational component of collaborative work is what students understand the goal of that work to be (Ames 1992). When…

  • Differentiate Science Lessons by Using VR in Station Rotations

    Journal Article |

    Blended learning strategies combined with innovative technology, for example, virtual reality (VR), can be used in science classrooms to differentiate teaching and enrich learning experiences. The positive impacts of…

  • Using iNaturalist to Support Place-Based Learning and Data Analysis

    Journal Article |

    Often, we think that to learn about nature, students must be in a “natural” place to experience the environment, but this assumption can be problematic on multiple levels. Not all schools have the resources to take…

  • Inheritance: It’s More Complicated Than That

    Journal Article |

    For the past 60 years, teaching and learning the science of inheritance and biological variation has largely been centered in Mendelian genetics. In classrooms, genetics instruction generally focuses on traits…

  • The Use of Storytelling to Model NGSS Science and Engineering Practices

    Journal Article |

    An important strand of three-dimensional learning in the Next Generation Science Standards is science and engineering practices (SEPs; NGSS Lead States 2013). The SEPs also are one of four critical attributes of…

  • Performance Assessment as Part of Efficient, Effective, and Equitable Instructional Practice

    Journal Article |

    Since the release of the NGSS, science classrooms across the United States have shifted science learning away from a focus on decontextualized facts and concepts and toward engaging students in making sense of the world…

  • Bringing the Outside In

    Journal Article |

    Classroom communities are more than just teachers and students. Administrators, other teachers and students, teacher aides, all school staff, families, friends, community leaders, and more influence a classroom…

  • Promoting Learning for All Through Explore-Before-Explain

    Journal Article |

    The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) highlight the importance of creating more equitable learning environments and engaging all students in science (NGSS Lead States 2013). In professional learning, we target…

  • Teaching Students to Read Equations

    Journal Article |

    The laws of nature are expressed in equation form in all physics courses. How these laws are taught can vary widely. In this article, I expand on previous Focus on Physics articles, particularly the March 2022 article “…

  • Translanguaging as an Essential Practice in Socially Just Science Classrooms

    Journal Article |

    In this interaction, Manuel and Rico (all names are pseudonyms) expertly mix Spanish and English to communicate as they collect data in a ninth grade physics lab. Your reaction to this mixture of English and Spanish,…

  • On Teaching Electricity Through History

    Journal Article |

    Electricity is a fascinating phenomenon and one of the most important driving forces in the natural world, and our understanding of it all began with a fossilized lump of tree resin and a mystical rock from ancient…

  • Stealing the Sun

    Journal Article |

    For as long as people have had stories to tell, folklore and tall tales have been a part of social gatherings. Storytelling helps us convey our history and learn our languages (Bowman and Carpenter 2004; Mzimela 2016).…

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