Young children love to investigate the natural world, and they love to take photographs. "Picture Science" goes beyond just documenting class projects. The book shows how to use digital photography to make each step in the scientific process--from posing a question, to gathering data, to showing findings--concrete and fun for children. Keyed…

Biological evolution is one of the over-arching concepts recommended for student learning by the "National Science Education Standards." As with all such complex concepts, student understanding of evolution is improved when instruction includes hands-on, inquiry-based activities. However, even authors writing in strong support of teaching…

In this inquiry-based activity, Roborovsky hamsters are used to provide students with an opportunity to develop their skills of analysis, inquiry, and design. These hamsters are easy to maintain, yet offer students a means to use conventional techniques and those of their own design to make further observations through measuring, assessing, and…

Along with the bright hues of orange, red, and yellow, the season of fall represents significant changes, such as day length and temperature. These changes provide excellent opportunities for students to use science process skills to examine how abiotic factors such as weather and temperature impact organisms. In this article, the authors describe…

The educational reform movement since the 1990s has led the secondary earth science curriculum in Taiwan into a stage of reshaping. The present study investigated secondary earth science teachers' perceptions on the Goals of Earth Science Education (GESE). The GESE should express the statements of philosophy and purpose toward which educators…

The rapid and accelerating pace of change in physiology and cell biology, along with the easy access to huge amounts of content, have altered the playing field for science students, yet most students are still mainly taught from textbooks. Of necessity, textbooks are usually broad in scope, cover topics much more superficially than do journal…

The unified approximations reduce the conceptual complexity by combining solutions for a relatively large number of different situations into just two similar sets of processes. Processes used to solve problems by either the unified or classical approximations require similar degrees of understanding of the underlying chemical processes.

A primary feature of the Math and Science Partnership Program Evaluation (MSP PE) is the examination of K-12 student achievement changes associated with the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Math and Science Partnership (MSP) Program. This article describes one of three complementary assessments of K-12 student achievement being conducted by the…

Constructing scientific explanations and participating in argumentative discourse are seen as essential practices of scientific inquiry (e.g., R. Driver, P. Newton, & J. Osborne, 2000). In this paper, we identify three goals of engaging in these related scientific practices: (1) sensemaking, (2) articulating, and (3) persuading. We propose using…

This article presents five activities that demonstrate developing thinking skills in students, uses comparable ELA and science skills. The thinking skills of Blooms Taxonomy are the organizer. Skills and processes gleaned from NYS ELA and Science Standards included in the article are: categorizing, comparing, following procedures, sequencing,…

The author of this paper submits that a mathematics student needs to learn to conjecture and prove or disprove said conjecture. Ergo, the purpose of the paper is to submit the thesis that learning requires doing; only through inquiry is learning achieved, and hence this paper proposes a programme of use of a modified Moore method in a Bridge to…

The health industry is an important and growing economic engine. Advances are being made in pharmaceutical and biotechnology discoveries and their applications (including manufacturing), as well as in health care services. As a result, there is an increasing sophistication of the products and services available and being developed, with an…

We all hope our classrooms don't take on a circus-like atmosphere, but juggling can be an engaging way to introduce elementary physics to students. The very act of tossing and catching objects can help students to understand the basic physical principles involved in rotating a set of objects. This article suggests a variety of simple hands-on…

To help eighth-grade students experience the excitement of Earth science research, the authors developed an inquiry-based project in which students evaluated and cataloged their campus geology and soils. Following class discussions of rock-weathering and soil-forming processes, students worked in groups to excavate multiple soil pits in the school…

Many initiatives for the improvement of undergraduate science education call for inquiry-based learning that emphasizes investigative projects and reading of the primary literature. These approaches give students an understanding of science as a process and help them integrate content presented in courses. At the same time, general initiatives to…