Federal legislation supports instruction of content areas for all individuals, yet professionals in the field of special education are left trying to find the relevant functional outcomes for science and other content instruction for students with disabilities enrolled in a functional curriculum. Research on effective instruction for students with…

Science, engineering, and technology permeate nearly every facet of modern life and hold the key to solving many of humanity's most pressing current and future challenges. The United States' position in the global economy is declining, in part because U.S. workers lack fundamental knowledge in these fields. To address the critical issues of U.S.…

This edited collection synthesizes current research on the most promising methods and models for designing coherent science instruction. Arising from the National Science Foundation-funded Delineating and Evaluating Coherent Instructional Designs for Education (DECIDE) project, this volume combines the insights of researchers from two Centers for…

An emerging body of research suggests that a set of broad "21st century skills"--such as adaptability, complex communication skills, and the ability to solve non-routine problems--are valuable across a wide range of jobs in the national economy. However, the role of K-12 education in helping students learn these skills is a subject of current…

The development of inquiry and project-based materials is challenging in many ways, not the least of which is the design of supports for teachers implementing such materials. We report on the design of educative and just-in-time teacher supports for an online project-based unit in ocean science. The teacher supports were visible as tabs on the…

This book shares the lessons learned by a large community of educational researchers and science teachers as they designed, developed, and investigated a new technology-enhanced learning environment known as WISE: The Web-Based Inquiry Science Environment. WISE offers a collection of free, customizable curriculum projects on topics central to the…

Having developed a technology-based teaching unit on weather that appeared to work well for middle school students, Nancy Butler Songer and her colleagues at the University of Michigan decided in the late 1990s to take the next logical step in their research program: They scaled up. This article discusses lessons learned by several faculty…

Guidelines are provided for writing science instructional objectives included in Department of Defense Dependent Schools (DODDS) Pacific Region science objective guides. Revision of the objectives is perhaps the most important part of the curriculum review that occurs for the DODDS once each 7 years. To provide a manageable system of objectives,…

The status of bilingual education in the United States is discussed with emphasis on science teaching. The impetus for the article comes from a final report of the office of Bilingual Education which states that one-half of the children with limited English proficiency are of Spanish-language background. (SA)