This lesson can be used at the beginning of the year to teach students how to conduct inquiries using the essential features described in "Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards" (NRC 1996). The lesson is divided into several activities which may be spread over several days or interspersed with your other beginning-of-the-year…

Clarifying ancient environments millions of years ago is necessary to better understand how ecosystems change over time, providing insight as to the potential impacts of current global warming. This module engages middle school students in the scientific process, asking them to use tooth measurement to test the null hypothesis that horse and tapir…

Venture into the author's seventh-grade classroom on any given day, and one is likely to see students hypothesizing, designing experiments to test their explanations, analyzing data, writing formal publications of results, and debating over scientific procedures in an attempt to justify their control of variables. Students are motivated, on-task,…

Explains the design and implementation of a student research project called Project SunSHINE. Explores the relationships between ultraviolet light and humidity, temperature, cloud type, and cloud cover. (SOE)

In this article, the author shares a very successful 50-minute inquiry-based physics lesson that uses only small metal cans, a bit of string, and the inquiring minds of middle schoolers. The topic of the lesson is wave motion and energy transfer. The intent of this article is to show that tests of student-generated hypotheses can be simple, quick,…