Presents a three-week interdisciplinary unit for starting the school year that focuses on the concept of flight. Enables students to acquire knowledge and develop process skills that they need later in the semester. (JRH)

Describes activities for starting the school year that allow students to begin learning laboratory skills and also gives them a chance to meet and interact with classmates in a relaxed atmosphere. (JRH)

Describes a series of 14 hands-on, low-cost exercises in plant sciences developed to support biology teaching and maintain student interest. Each exercise includes education objectives, biology background, detailed procedures, and topics to stimulate discussion and critical thinking. (DDR)

Presents an alternative way to teach chemistry by using transmuted laboratory activities in which students must predict outcomes within a certain error factor. Includes nine sample labs. (MKR)

Presents an alternative approach to bonding and geometry--the electron domain model--which avoids some of the problems with the conventional approach. Discusses difficulties with the orbital model at the introductory level, electron spin and the Pauli exclusion principle, electron pair domains, nonequivalent domains, multiple bonds, and origins…

Shows how ionization energies provide a convenient method for obtaining electronegativity values that is simpler than the conventional methods. Demonstrates how approximate atomic charges can be calculated for polar molecules and how this method of determining electronegativities may lead to deeper insights than are typically possible for the…

Presents three science activities targeted to help urban students learn about nature: (1) observing coloration patterns of pigeons; (2) measuring local rainfall and comparing it to other areas; and (3) conducting a biodiversity study by observing a patch of lawn. (YDS)

Presents an experiment using plants grown on the classroom window sill that allows students to gain valuable hands-on experience in the collection and analysis of empirical data. (ASK)

Reports on a study to discover physics student teachers' objectives for practical work in teaching physics. Participants took a course based on a unique perceptional approach. Results indicate that after attending the course, student teachers found that the practical work which they had done was very useful. (Author/MM)

Elementary teachers can use weather folklore to help students explore and discover facts about weather. An experiment with woolly bear caterpillars examines whether their stripes can predict what kind of winter weather there will be. A investigation about moon halos and rain gives students experience setting up investigations based on questions…

Presents a physics lab activity in which students determine if an electrode configuration simulates a section of concentric cylinders or concentric spheres. (WRM)

Explains why one orientation of an asymmetric spring-and-mass system leads to a higher frequency of 0000000000 than another orientation. (WRM)

Reports on Westfield State College's Animal Behavior course which requires students to design their own research projects, write a scientific research proposal, conduct experiments, and present results in the form of a scientific paper. (Author/MM)

This study investigates how 25 junior high school students employed their bodies of knowledge and responded to problem cues while individually performing a science experiment and reasoning about a drops phenomenon. Line-by-line content analysis conducted on students' written ad hoc explanations aimed to reveal students' concepts and their…

We report the development of a simplified procedure for restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis of mushrooms. We have adapted standard molecular techniques to be amenable to an undergraduate laboratory setting in order to allow students to explore basic questions about fungal diversity and relatedness among mushroom species. The…