While school field trips are valued as supplementary educational tools, Andersen and Zhang (2003) found that in practice field trips are often treated as one-off learning experiences and not furthered through connections to the classroom curriculum. Although students gain exposure to new phenomena and are able to participate in learning activities…

Students in the intermediate grades love to talk--but not necessarily about making sense of what they are learning. How do teachers design classrooms that cultivate productive discourse? How do they get out of the way and teach children to learn? First, let's give them something to talk about. Second, teachers need to teach them how to engage in…

Model Eliciting Activities (MEAs) are pedagogical approaches that allow teachers to integrate multiple subjects into creative multi-day learning experiences that captivate students' curiosity and engage them in real-life problem solving. MEAs are known in the fields of mathematics and engineering (Gilat and Amit 2014), but despite their ability to…

Dramatic inquiry is a teaching approach where students explore science through differentiated learning experiences, so that students can engage in learning in multiple ways (e.g., through gesture, song, written and spoken language). It positions students as competent problem solvers and draws upon students' strengths through collaborative learning…

The concepts of "culturally relevant pedagogy" and "culturally responsive teaching" have been interpreted and enacted in various ways for over two decades. Informed by this research, the author shares a critical approach to teaching and learning using "sociotransformative constructivism" (sTc). This framework merges…

Makerspaces are collaborative workplaces equipped with a variety of high- and low-tech tools and materials that individuals can use to create physical and digital products. In this article the authors take the perspective that integrating a makerspace into a school is a proactive, thoughtful, and time-consuming process. To help meaningfully…

While field trips are an exciting way to engage students in science learning, they may not be feasible. Therefore, the authors decided to create a 5E (Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate, Evaluation; Bybee 2014) field experience for a multi-aged primary class where the learners would investigate soil samples in the school yard and compare and…

This article describes an informal program in one school where grade K-1 students learn a variety of new science vocabulary words relating to animal characteristics. The students are introduced to a new group of animals and their characteristics through storytelling, games, discussion, and crafts (see Table 1, p. 34). The new vocabulary words are…

In this article, Mann and Pynes describe a five-day mini-project-based learning (PBL) unit about organisms and their environments that addresses the "Next Generation Science Standards" (3-LS4-3). Third-grade students were asked how they could determine which animals live in their neighborhoods. In teacher-determined collaborative groups,…

Formative assessments serve to engage students in active sense-making, making them critical tools for both teachers and students. Though formative assessments may be an informal mode of assessing, they are one of the most important, especially when teaching science. As a subject, teaching science does not have the same kind of beginning-middle-end…

In the STEM classroom, students can work in collaborative teams to build those essential skills needed for the 21st-century world. In project-based learning (PBL), teams of four to six students are often randomly selected to describe a realistic situation that may occur in today's workplace; this may be done by counting off in fours, fives,…

With a belief in the need for a reform in education that prepares students for life, work, and citizenship in a globalized economy, leaders were determined to connect students across the district, state, country, and globe in global collaborative STEM projects. These projects were aligned to the standards but also afforded students the opportunity…

In their role as careful observers of nature, citizen scientists are helping to "answer the most challenging ecological and environmental questions, addressing issues that affect everyday lives" (McKinley et al. 2015). They help answer these questions by providing scientists with a large pool of data that can be analyzed (National…

Art and science help students investigate light energy and practice fair testing. With the goal of finding a way to save "Beady Kid" from invisible rays, students used science practices to investigate the transfer of light energy from the Sun. During this art-integrated science lesson presented in this article, upper elementary (grades…

To show students how engineering design practices reduce the impacts of a natural hazard, the authors--two science educators and an elementary teacher--taught a three-day 5E lesson that focused on hurricanes. They specifically focused on hurricanes because their students are located near a coastal area and are familiar with the effects of this…