Background: Integrated STEM approaches are acknowledged as important for making school subjects relevant and engaging for students and are reinforced with the current emphasis on computational thinking. Still, such approaches are rarely realized in schools. This study investigates how the traditional 'grammar of schooling' may prevent realization…

In this interdisciplinary and field-based activity, grade 5 to 9 students engage in a comprehensive scientific study of snow. Through a series of in-class and out-of-class structured interdisciplinary and team-teaching lesson progressions, students will collect data to be able to analyze and apply knowledge about weather, the physical properties…

While Shulman argues that an important component of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) is teachers' understanding of the alternative conceptions commonly held by students, relatively little is known about what students believe about many topics in the school curriculum. This paper focuses on a content area typically featured in Geography…

This project analyzed the effectiveness of a city-wide wireless weather sensor network, the Taipei Weather Science Learning Network (TWIN), in facilitating elementary and junior high students' study of weather science. The network, composed of sixty school-based weather sensor nodes and a centralized weather data archive server, provides students…

Classmates at Reservoir High School sometimes call Dalyn Jones and Anthea Fields the "Katrina chicks." Left homeless by the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina, both teenagers migrated from the New Orleans area to Maryland in September of 2006. They met for the first time here when they showed up on the same day to register for 9th…

A two-dimensional weather map is actually a physical representation of three-dimensional atmospheric conditions at a specific point in time. Abstract thinking is required to visualize this two-dimensional image in three-dimensional form. But once that visualization is accomplished, many of the meteorological concepts and processes conveyed by the…

With support from NASA's (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Goddard Space Flight Center, IGES (Institute for Global Environmental Strategies) has developed educational materials that incorporate information and data from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM), a joint satellite mission between the United States and Japan.…