Virtually every student knows someone who has battled cancer. It is a topic that is of great interest to many students because of their personal connection to the subject. Mitosis is an important topic in a middle school unit on cells and cell processes (National Science Standards, Grades 5?8: Life Sciences: Content Standard C). Studying cancer…

Of the forces commonly encountered when solving problems in Newtonian mechanics, introductory texts usually limit illustrations of the definitions of conservative and nonconservative forces to gravity, spring forces, kinetic friction and fluid resistance. However, at the expense of very little class time, the question of whether each of the common…

The concept of interaction that underlies Newton's Laws of Motion is compared with the students' commonsense ideas of force and motion. An approach to teaching Newton's Third Law of Motion is suggested that focuses on refining the student's intuitive thinking on the nature of interaction.

It is shown that the well-known Lorentz formula for time dilation can be derived from a distance-time graph plotted for a spaceship communicating with Earth.

The practices and justifications of 15 pre-service science teachers in using ICT were explored by survey, observation and interview. Interactive whiteboards are frequently employed, although predominantly as projection screens for presentations, whilst datalogging and spreadsheets are used infrequently. Trainees incorporate ICT to enhance pupil…

The proliferation of bioinformatics in modern biology marks a modern revolution in science that promises to influence science education at all levels. This study analyzed secondary school science standards of 49 U.S. states (Iowa has no science framework) and the District of Columbia for content related to bioinformatics. The bioinformatics…

There are obstacles to teaching science; however, these obstacles are not insurmountable. One obstacle is the students themselves. Students often labor under the misconception or anxiety that the course material will be too difficult to understand, or boring (mind-numbing), or that the information learned will not be applicable in their day-to-day…

Content knowledge and pedagogical practices are of particular concern to middle school science instructors teaching density. First introduced in elementary grades with the ideas of floating and sinking, density taught in middle school is geared toward understanding through the use of mathematical formulas. Using a lesson-plan study design, the…

The objective of this study was to evaluate the effect of a dynamic software simulation on the understanding of the kinetic molecular theory by 7th graders. Students in the control group (n = 62) studied a curricular unit that addressed the differences in arrangement and motion of molecules in the three phases of matter. The experimental group (n…

Some students are "outsiders" in today's science classroom. What makes an outsider, and how can the teacher break down barriers and reach these students? This article details one teacher's journey as she attempts to understand and connect with an outsider in her science classroom. Written from the first person, it is a poignant tale of…

This article presents an activity in which students pool their knowledge and creativity to make a song presenting what they have learned in a unit on the rock cycle. This highly motivating, integrated performance assessment incorporates multiple intelligences, reinforces learning, and is a student favorite in the elementary and middle grades.

Middle school science teachers report using textbooks regularly although these textbooks have been criticized for not following standards-based principles for concept learning, and student reading achievement has been stagnant for 20 years. Effective strategic reading instruction has been documented for middle school students but few teachers use…

During the past few years the authors have developed a new approach to the teaching of physical science, a general education course typically found in the curricula of nearly every college and university. This approach, called "Physics in Films" (Efthimiou and Llewellyn 2006 Phys. Teach. 44 28-33), uses scenes from popular films to illustrate…

The author describes how he used to teach a unit on food webs and ecosystems using actual food webs as models. However, the models used by the author tend to be either too simplistic or too complicated for his students. A few years ago, he solved these problems by making up his own food web, complete with invented plants and animals. The model has…

In this paper, I recall previous arguments for a hermeneutic approach to science and claim that such an approach necessitates attention to the development of dispositions. I undertake an analysis of Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics to identify and describe dispositions relevant to a hermeneutic approach to science. I then apply…