JoinAll Physical Science resources
Lesson Plan
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about density. The probe is designed to find out whether students have commonly held ideas about mass, volume, shape, and other properties that interfere with their conceptual unders...
By Page Keeley and Susan Cooper
Journal Article
Modeling Magnetism With the Floating Paper Clip
By Sarah Braden, Lauren Barth-Cohen, Sara Gailey, and Tamara Young
Journal Article
By Rundong Jiang, Chenglu Li, Xudong Huang, Shannon Sung, and Charles Xie
Lesson Plan
The purpose of this assessment probe is to comprehensively elicit students’ ideas about the relationship between force and motion. The list of possible answers includes several distracters that are based on learning research; thus the probe will te...
By Page Keeley and Rand Harrington
Lesson Plan
This probe is designed to elicit students’ ideas about changing the direction of motion in the absence of air. Many students will have seen movies or television shows in which spaceships turn by banking or using wing flaps. In outer space, where th...
By Page Keeley and Rand Harrington
Lesson Plan
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about sound. The probe is designed to reveal whether students recognize that sound is produced by vibrating matter. ...
Lesson Plan
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about force related to the interaction between inanimate objects. The probe is designed to determine which forces students think act on an object at rest when it is inside a fast-mov...
By Page Keeley and Rand Harrington
Lesson Plan
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit beginning ideas about types of forces. The probe is designed to reveal whether students recognize that forces can act both in direct contact with an object and at a distance. ...
By Page Keeley and Rand Harrington
Lesson Plan
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit beginning ideas about forces. The probe is designed to reveal whether students generally identify forces as pushes and pulls. ...
By Page Keeley and Rand Harrington
Lesson Plan
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about chemical change. The probe is designed to find out how students determine whether a new substance with a different chemical makeup is formed when matter undergoes a change. ...
By Page Keeley and Susan Cooper
Lesson Plan
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students’ ideas about pairs of forces that fit Newton’s third law. The probe is specifically designed to reveal whether students can identify third law force pairs as involving different objects. ...
By Page Keeley and Rand Harrington