Teachers can find opportunities to incorporate design thinking and scientific inquiry within any lesson where a constraint of the design can be connected to a scientific experiment. Within a lesson, this connection establishes context between engineering and science and can positively impact students' learning and interest in these subjects. The…

This paper describes the multiple school and school science experiences of eight Latina students of Central American descent in a tracked, urbanized, middle school setting. Framed by a sociocultural perspective, I describe how eight seventh and eighth grade Latino girls interacted with school science. Implications for the concept "science for…

In 2 experiments the authors investigated whether assigning a perspective to middle school students prior to reading a long informational text would improve their reading comprehension. Pretest-posttest control group designs were employed in both experiments, in Experiment 1 (n = 146 fifth- and sixth-grade students) and in Experiment 2 (n = 83…

Background: Cluster-randomized experiments that assign intact groups such as schools or school districts to treatment conditions are increasingly common in educational research. Such experiments are inherently multilevel designs whose sensitivity (statistical power and precision of estimates) depends on the variance decomposition across levels.…

Proven through more than a decade of rigorous research to be effective with both teachers and students, "Making Sense of SCIENCE" helps teachers gain a deep and enduring understanding of tricky science topics, think and reason scientifically, and support content literacy in science, thereby increasing student achievement. The materials…

A wind energy focused curriculum for grades 4-8 was designed and implemented to promote the understanding of wind energy concepts with American Indian students. 57 students who participated in the 2009 summer program of the "Reach for the Sky" (RFTS) Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) received the curriculum. The…

Hands-on science typically uses physical materials to give students first-hand experience in scientific methodologies, but the recent availability of virtual laboratories raises an important question about whether what students' hands are on matters to their learning. The overall findings of two articles that employed simple comparisons of…