Join-
What Can You Learn From Fossils?
Book Chapter |
At one point or another, it seems like all students are interested in paleontology. Wonderful extinct animals like dinosaurs excite the imagination like almost nothing else. Once you have the students' interest, you…
-
Mass Extinction and Meteor Collisions With Earth
Book Chapter |
Paleontologists divide extinctions into two broad categories—background extinctions and mass extinctions. Background extinctions occur continuously while mass extinctions are unusual in that they involve very large…
-
How Are Fossils Collected and Prepared?
Book Chapter |
This chapter describes some ways that fossils are found and prepared and guides the reader though the steps of preparing real fossil specimens. Three activities are presented that focus on specific fossil collection and…
-
How Can You Tell the Age of Earth?
Book Chapter |
In the activity in this chapter, a table of measurements is presented that can be used to construct a model of the age of Earth and some of the most important events in its history. The models are constructed out of a…
-
Book Chapter |
This chapter explores the methods of cladistics and facilitates an understanding of evolution through active learning. Four activities are presented that address the methods of tracing evolution in fossils and give…
-
Diversity, Classification, and Taxonomy
Book Chapter |
This chapter places fossils in the contexts of their distribution on the globe and how we name them and quantify their communities. The activities analyze how diversity is measured, how dinosaurs are classified, and…
-
Book Chapter |
This chapter looks at fossils from a humanistic perspective. Fossil fuels—coal, oil, and natural gas—make up over 80% of our energy sources. They are called fossil fuels because they all come from ancient organic matter…
-
Book Chapter |
Whenever a fossil is beautiful, appealing, or is more than of ordinary significance, it may be called art. The first activity in this chapter challenges students to submit an entry on dinosaurs to a campus art contest…
-
A Knowledge-Based Framework for the Classroom Assessment of Student Science Understanding
Book Chapter |
Recent research in cognitive science linked with established principles of educational assessment provide a framework that science teachers and researchers can use to assess student understanding of science. Knowledge-…
-
Evolving Ideas: Assessment in an Evolution Course
Book Chapter |
As science instruction moves from lectures that emphasize lists of facts to more student-centered approaches that emphasize knowledge generation and justification, it is clear that assessments must also change. The…
-
Integrating an Assessment Plan Into A K—12/ University Engineering Partnership
Book Chapter |
A comprehensive assessment plan is a valuable component of a university’s K—12 outreach effort. The K—12 Engineering Outreach Initiative has integrated an assessment plan into each stage of its outreach—development,…
-
Varying Instructional Methods and Assessment of Students in High School Chemistry
Book Chapter |
New content standards call for the implementation of new and varied pedagogical interventions and instructional techniques. An experimental project in which chemistry was taught using new pedagogical and assessment…
-
Performance Assessment Tasks as a Stimulus for Collaboration Among Preservice and Inservice Teachers
Book Chapter |
The Performance Assessment project was a collaboration initiated by a university team of instructors and a local school district in which inservice and preservice teachers developed and implemented science performance…
-
Assessment in Support of Contextually Authentic Inquiry
Book Chapter |
If research into the assessment of science learning is going to make a difference for teachers, it must be applicable to the realities of K—12 classrooms. This research study conducted in urban elementary schools…
-
Helping Students Understand the Minds-On Side of Learning Science
Book Chapter |
This collaboration between a fourth-grade teacher and university researcher resulted in the development of the Cognitive Strategies Inventory, an assessment instrument targeting writing, discussing, computing, reading,…
35896 Results