Describes creative methods of teaching elementary level science: eighth-grade hands-on experiments are made with rare rocks and gems via a "Mining by Mail" program; third-grade students use the "I Wonder" approach to examine questions of interest; process skills are adapted for different age levels. A staff development folder…

Describes a two-week lesson on electric fields that combined lecture, interactive video, lab experimentation, computer spread sheets, and computer-assisted-graphing. (PR)

College physics teachers describe their experience using a computer-based classroom communication system that facilitates presentation of questions for small-group work, collection of student answers, and display of histograms showing how the class answered, all feeding into classwide discussions. The technique engages students in active learning…

These designers approaches their physics lesson design task from the viewpoint of play. The designs, all having strong gaming influences, aim to be flexible enough to take advantage of the experience and ideas of a teacher working with a standard curriculum, yet interesting enough for students to want to continue exploring resources on their own…

This article describes strategies for integrating alternate assessments into the context of ongoing instruction and for enabling students with disabilities to take a more active role in the construction and self-evaluation of their own assessments. Fourth-grade, seventh-grade, and middle school examples of integrating assessment and instruction…

Describes how the Hershey Montessori Farm School in Huntsburg, Ohio, developed an advanced biology course, which begins with an experience-based, task-oriented approach within different biomes of the surrounding environs while incorporating high school content and scientific method. Concludes that integrating place-based and contextual inquiries…

This study explored preservice teachers' (n = 25) knowledge structures and their mastery of content knowledge in relation to their ability to diagnose the strengths and weaknesses of a fourth grader's videotaped explanations of a scientific phenomenon, i.e., molecular kinetic properties of air. Participants' knowledge structures were analyzed…

The interactive science notebook (ISN) is a perfect opportunity for science educators to encapsulate and promote the most cutting-edge constructivist teaching strategies while simultaneously addressing standards, differentiation of instruction, literacy development, and maintenance of an organized notebook as laboratory and field scientists do.…

Any science teacher who wants his or her students to be engaged in real science is going to engage them in real science writing. Writing in science should begin with clear, imaginative writing purposes and stimuli that are then scaffolded in such a way that students are able to find an organizational structure for their writing. Writing fluency is…

This study examined preservice teachers' understanding of, and processes when, designing instruction. Participants were 47 juniors and seniors enrolled in science methods courses. Qualitative methods and analysis of written reflections and interviews revealed the beliefs and views the preservice teachers had about planning. Findings are as…

The study explores urban second graders' thinking and talking about the concepts of evaporation, boiling, and condensation that emerged in the context of intertextuality within an integrated science-literacy unit on the topic of States of Matter, which emphasized the water cycle. In that unit, children and teacher engaged in a variety of…

This study investigates the effect of a conceptual change approach over traditional instruction on students' understanding of chemical equilibrium concepts (e.g. dynamic nature of equilibrium, definition of equilibrium constant, heterogeneous equilibrium, qualitative interpreting of equilibrium constant, changing the reaction conditions). This…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how aware high school biology teachers are of societal issues (values, moral, ethic, and legal issues) while teaching genetics, genetics engineering, molecular genetics, human heredity, and evolution. The study includes a short historical review of World War II atrocities during the Holocaust when…

In this paper we present a simple set-up that illustrates the mechanism of sap ascent in plants and demonstrates that it can easily draw water up to heights of a few meters. The set-up consists of a tube with the lower end submerged in water and the upper one connected to a filter supported by a standard filter-holder. The evaporation of water…

Since biology is one of the most dynamic research fields within the natural sciences, the gap between the accumulated knowledge in biology and the knowledge that is taught in schools, increases rapidly with time. Our long-term objective is to develop means to bridge between the dynamics of biological discoveries and the biology teachers and…