Despite increasing accountability requirements and a national call for transparency in public policy, Mid-Atlantic Region state education agencies indicate that they have little information about what instructional materials districts adopt. This report describes first-year results of an ongoing project to generate and share information on core…

Too often, students enter our classrooms with insufficient knowledge of physical science. As a result, they have a difficult time understanding content in texts, lectures, and laboratory activities. This lack of background knowledge can have an impact on their ability to ask questions and wonder--both key components of inquiry. In this article,…

The authors tested whether students can be taught to better understand conventional representations in diagrams, photographs, and other visual representations in science textbooks. The authors developed a teacher-delivered, workbook-and-discussion-based classroom instructional method called Conventions of Diagrams (COD). The authors trained 1…

With 101 easy and inexpensive activities to do on school grounds, "Schoolyard Science" can help students develop their observation and inquiry skills as well as an appreciation of their outdoor environment. Covering topics such as lower plants, gardens, insects and other invertebrates, energy, and Earth science, Thomas Lord and Holly Travis…

In a society where technology plays an ever-increasing role, students' ability to understand the underlying science and make smart social and environmental decisions based on that knowledge is crucial. "Welcome to Nanoscience" helps biology, chemistry, and Earth science teachers introduce the revolutionary fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology…

Students do not have a good understanding of how rocks form. Instead, they have many non-scientific alternative conceptions to explain different aspects of rock formation. Using 10 interviews and nearly 200 questionnaires filled out by students at four different colleges, we identified many alternative conceptions students have about rock…

The goal of this study is to identify Thai students' prior knowledge about particle motion when P-waves arrive. This existing idea significantly influences what and how students learn in the classroom. The data were collected via conceptual open-ended questions designed by the researchers and through explanatory follow-up interviews. Participants…

The realm of Earth science (ES) is increasingly data-intensive. Geoinformatics research attempts to robustly smooth and accelerate the flow of data to information, information to knowledge, and knowledge to decisions and to supply necessary infrastructure and tools for advancing ES. Enabling easy access to and use of large volumes of ES data and…

The non-computational brand of cognitivism is based on the premise that performances, including those of children, are generated by mental models or representations, i.e., "internal" resources. The sociocultural approach, on the other hand, regards context, i.e., an "external" resource, as the chief means of elaborating…

Ed Willis Barnett had quite a military training: he attended the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, (1917 to 1920) and served in both World Wars. He was also an accomplished fencer, and earned a position on the 1928 U.S. Olympic fencing team. That year the summer Olympics were held in Amsterdam, so he traveled to Europe for the…

A systematic assessment of media-based coverage of geoscience topics relative to those found in textbooks is presented here. The specific question addressed is to what extent fully indexed media and print news sources can provide a useful model for course development. Whereas the improvement of students' scientific literacy cannot be achieved…

How does the brain learn to recognize an object from multiple viewpoints while scanning a scene with eye movements? How does the brain avoid the problem of erroneously classifying parts of different objects together? How are attention and eye movements intelligently coordinated to facilitate object learning? A neural model provides a unified…

Ethnic and racial minorities constitute an important part of the geosciences community because of their diverse perspectives and backgrounds. However, the geosciences have the poorest diversity record of all the science and engineering fields. Recruitment of minorities is important and numerous programs are focusing on engaging students in…

The Hudson River Watershed contains a variety of geologic, topographic, climatic, and hydrologic features and a diversity of land-use patterns--making it an ideal model for studying human impact on the coastal environment. In this article, the authors present the Hudson River Plume (HRP), a problem-based online module that explores nonpoint-source…

This study explored the phenomenon of testing effect during science concept assessments, including the mechanism behind it and its impact upon a learner's conceptual understanding. The participants consisted of 208 high school students, in either the 11th or 12th grade. Three types of tests (traditional multiple-choice test, correct concept test,…