Points out the difficulties that English language learners may have and advocates that teachers help students acquire academic scientific language from words that can mean different things in science and be confusing. Recommends using graphic organizers, providing vocabulary support, and pre-writing and reading activities as possible ways to help…

Students have problems successfully arranging an electric circuit to make the bulb produce light. Investigates the percentage of students able to complete a circuit with a given apparatus, and the effects of prior experience on student success. Recommends hands-on activities at the elementary and secondary school levels. (Contains 14 references.)…

Presents an activity that involves students in a hands-on, creative project in which they use higher order thinking skills while designing and studying the basics of floating devices. Focuses on inquiry, a number of scientific principles, and the relationship between mathematics and science. (ASK)

Uses marshmallows to teach students about atomic structure by having students make models of atoms out of marshmallows. Allows for creativity while enhancing students' understanding of atoms. (ASK)

Presents a theoretical framework for evaluating inquiry tasks and how similar they are to authentic science. Suggests that inquiry tasks commonly used in schools evoke reasoning processes that are qualitatively different from the processes employed in real scientific inquiry, and school reasoning tasks appear to be based on epistemology that…

Questions the goals of high school to college science education and compares what is achieved with traditional teaching strategies. Describes how science majors and non-science majors alike are based on an authentic field-based research. Explains the principles of best practices in undergraduate science education. (YDS)

Claims that effective education brings the real world in face-to-face contact with students, enabling them to explore and examine ideas to reach new understanding based in actual reality. (Author/CCM)

Explains the terms resonance and amplitude, the relationship between them, and the effects of resonance in our daily lives. Introduces pendulum activities that explain how resonance works. (YDS)

Describes a hands-on lesson for teaching high school students the concept of the rock cycle using sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous rocks. Students use a rock cycle diagram to identify pairs of rocks. From the rock cycle, students explain on paper how their first rock became the second rock and vice versa. (PVD)

Presents a science activity in which students create a skeleton by using their knowledge of skeletal and muscular systems. (YDS)

Describes a project for high school chemistry students that links science with art: making glazed ceramic pots. Includes materials list, base glaze recipe, step-by-step procedures for setting up a lab, and the time frame involved. Text for students covers the history of earthenware pottery, fundamentals of working with clay, description of the…

Discusses the problems of science education in Thailand and presents a hands-on teaching approach in science and mathematics as a revolutionary approach to these problems. (YDS)

The question of facilitating inquiry in the context of whole-class interactions versus individual work in the laboratory is not a new issue in science education. Science teachers have always been confronted with the question of the value added by the time and expense required for individual work in the science laboratory versus inquiry…

As a first-grade teacher in an urban school, the author was eager to bring authentic science into the classroom. She wanted students to experience various scientific processes, and wanted their parents to be involved, too. To meet this goal,she implemented a program first learned of as a graduate student in a science methods class at Texas…

The series of activities presented in this unit of study help students learn by starting with map basics and adding new concepts with each activity. This approach helps students build an understanding of topographic maps while they participate in a variety of hands-on experiences. The unit is meaningful, fun, and engaging for the students, and is…