1This article describes how, by incorporating NASA's Students' Cloud Observations On-Line (S'COOL) project into a problem-based learning (PBL) activity, middle school students are engaged in authentic scientific research where they observe and record information about clouds and contribute ground truth data to NASA's Clouds and the Earth's…

Word walls are designed to serve as visual scaffolds and are a common classroom tool used to support reading and language arts instruction. To support vocabulary development in science and support students who are ELLs, Husty and Jackson (2008) created interactive word walls that resemble semantic maps (Masters, Mori, and Mori 1993). Semantic maps…

The seasons are often modeled for students using two spherical objects, one representing the Sun and one representing the Earth. Solely using this model, however, neglects a critical aspect of learning--how students actually see the world. This lesson challenges students to explore seasonal variations as they create and analyze sunrise/sunset…

Students' difficulties with accurately conceptualizing the relationships among the Earth, Moon, and Sun are well documented. Any teacher who has seen the film "A Private Universe" (Schneps and Sadler 1988) will remember the challenge the interviewees experienced when trying to explain their understanding of this phenomenon. This paper describes a…

In the Walking Out Graphs Lesson described here, students experience several types of representations used to describe motion, including words, sentences, equations, graphs, data tables, and actions. The most important theme of this lesson is that students have to understand the consistency among these representations and form the habit of…

Learning how the periodic table has developed over time can provide an important foundation for students' future science learning, as they begin to explore the explanatory power of other models in science. In this activity, students are given the opportunity to investigate the generation of the modern periodic table, through a process of creating…

Based on the recommendation of the AAAS and the NRC, middle level science is the rightful introduction for a systems approach, including the study of its parts, subsystems, interconnections, and interrelationships. Dr. Seuss's "The Lorax" provides an excellent opportunity to combine ecological consequences within a systems approach (Sweeney 2001).…

The reading of science-related, historical nonfiction alone does not necessarily lead students to make personal connections to science or understand science as a human endeavor interdependent with culture, society, and history. Teachers must structure students' reading to ensure that they consider specific aspects of science while reading and…

Making connections is an emerging education theme of the 21st century. Science teachers are encouraged to connect new learning with prior knowledge, learning with student interests and experience, and classroom activities with the history and nature of science. Strategies that facilitate these connections enrich and enhance instruction. In this…

Teaching science in middle school is both rewarding and demanding. Creating an exciting learning environment with a rich science curriculum that engages all students is challenging enough. Monitoring the progress of as many as 150 individual students and knowing that they understand the science concepts we are teaching can be overwhelming. How can…

Recently, the authors engaged in a collaborative inquiry with a sixth grade science class to explore mind mapping, a graphic organizer that can be used to generate ideas, take notes, develop concepts and ideas, and improve memory (Buzan 1979). With a very limited body of research available on how to best use mind maps in the classroom, the authors…