This paper highlights the design process and implementation for an "all majors" undergraduate course that allows students a chance to reconnect with the natural world. During this course students explore a wide range of biological and physical science based topics that seek to highlight human intervention and our impacts on the planet.…

Professionally developed and freely accessible through the Internet, scientific data maps have great potential for teaching and learning with data in the science classroom. Solving problems or developing ideas while using data maps of Earth phenomena in the science classroom may help students to understand the nature and process of science. Little…

The work aims to improve the assessment of creative problem-solving in science education by employing language technologies and computational-statistical machine learning methods to grade students' natural language responses automatically. To evaluate constructs like creative problem-solving with validity, open-ended questions that elicit…

The tree house detectives go galactic with their latest project by traveling to Mars and also seeing how the Moon affects the Earth. They visit the largest radio telescope in the world and help look for intelligent life in the universe. The tree house detectives prepare for an out-of-this-world vacation as they explore the future of space travel.…

Describes the active role which regional Japanese laboratories are playing in specific fields of applied research such as: (1) pollution of the sea; (2) developing methods of coping with the exceptional variety of natural disasters; and (3) preparing for earthquake. (HM)

A long-term study was conducted to test the effectiveness of visual thinking networking (VTN), a new generation of knowledge representation strategies with 56 ninth grade earth science students. The recent findings about the brain's organization and processing conceptually ground VTN as a new cognitive tool used by learners when making their…

Describes the stages and outcomes of a junior high school science lesson on erosion and deposition utilizing a "kids as researchers" theme. Stages include awareness, discussion, investigation, experimentation, generalization, and extension. (SK)

Describes a learning activity when students construct a model of a buried valley by using computer assistance. Explanation of the problem includes mathematical models and illustrations. (MA)

This teacher's guide, with accompanying videotape, presents an episode of the NASA SCI Files. In this episode, one of the tree house detectives has had an accident and cannot get into the tree house. Using problem-based learning, the rest of the gang investigates the world of simple machines and physical science and "pull" together to…

Investigates the interaction between semantic knowledge and process skills in eighth-grade students' (N=27) performance in solving two types of problems (analogies and set-membership) of inducing structure drawn from physical geology concepts. (DS)

Introduces the American Renaissance in Science Education (ARISE) project. Discusses factors influencing the project's success. (YDS)

The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of Science-Technology-Society (STS) curriculum on students' scientific literacy, problem solving and decision making. Four hundred and eighty (480) Senior Secondary two science and non-science students were randomly selected from intact classes in six secondary schools in Calabar Municipality of…

Describes a learning module designed to help students use the factor labeling method in problem solving. (ZWH)

Discusses two ninth grade ten-week courses which use problem solving as one of the main teaching methods. Anecdotes are used to set up problems to be solved in student investigations. (MLH)