The authors developed a lesson for teachers to integrate chemistry and culinary arts, providing students with an opportunity to participate in three-dimensional learning, engage in science and engineering practices, and apply disciplinary core content and crosscutting concepts (Krajcik et al. 2014). The project involved five classes: three…

Helping students understand that the scientific community's claims change through time, sometimes radically, allows them to develop a well-grounded sense of the "nature of science." Learning to reason about how scientific claims come to be accepted, and later refuted, is important for understanding the tentative nature of scientific…

This high school life science unit introduces students to the intersection of science, economics, geography, and culture through the current practices of palm oil cultivation in the tropics. For this article, the authors travelled to Sabah Province, Malaysia, to visit palm oil plantations, conduct interviews, and collect resources to help students…

COVID-19 is the first global pandemic in the age of the internet and the world has collectively documented the virus's spread, offering a unique opportunity to study both the virus and the streams related to COVID-19, on topics from testing access to income to race. They develop their own research question to investigate the relationship between…

Although the existence of and access to clean water are essential for sustaining life on Earth, multiple studies have demonstrated students' nascent understanding of basic water principles. Students have misconceptions related to the water cycle (Ben-zvi-Assarf and Orion 2005), groundwater (Dickerson and Dawkins 2004; Covitt et al. 2009), and the…

The United States is currently experiencing its most severe measles outbreak in decades, driven in part by parents' belief that vaccines cause autism. That harmful misinformation is contrary to scientific evidence (DeStefano et al. 2013). The CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest multidisciplinary…

Each year, an increasing number of science teachers integrate modeling into their instructional repertoires, and in the process, they see how this disciplinary practice helps students reason and revise their thinking about complex events in the natural world. The NGSS Science and Engineering Practice of developing and using models is intended to…

Fall 2020 presented myriad challenges for teachers trying to plan curricula to meet students' social-emotional and learning needs following an unprecedented spring and summer of isolation and loss due to the pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 (Rivera and Wallace 2020). The result of creative planning and adjusting of curricula for remote instruction…

The "Next Generation Science Standards" (NGSS) stress the need for all students to receive excellent science instruction--including those with disabilities--based upon disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and science and engineering practices (NGSS Lead States 2013). Further, the NGSS emphasize reducing disparities in student…

Constructing scientific arguments is an important skill, and is specifically addressed by the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) science and engineering practice of Engaging in Arguments From Evidence. To ensure that students understand the significance of a scientific argument, they need experiences that will help them understand, use, and…

A lesson that focuses on the intricate co-evolution of flowers with their pollinators is one way to help students learn the delicate balance in nature and help ensure that our actions do not upset this balance. In this lesson students use the engineering design process to engineer a flower that is a perfect model for its chosen pollinator. Next,…

One way to develop a cross-curricular lesson is to select the most common mathematical formulas used in science and carefully develop and implement tasks that allow students to make connections between the mathematical representations and theoretical/physical science concepts. The slope-intercept formula, which is used to study relationships…

The climate justice lesson described in this article takes two to four class periods and assumes students have been introduced to the causes and effects of climate change. Using a phenomena-based teaching strategy, students are introduced to some of our most vulnerable communities around the world. They are the ones most defenseless when it comes…

Social justice has gained momentum over the past decades with a surge of attention since March 2020. Among many seeking social justice, individuals with disabilities often are forgotten or excluded. Students with disabilities consistently scored below students without disabilities, in all age categories, on the 2015 National Assessment of…

Fisheries scientists make sure that fish populations ("fisheries") are managed properly, neither over- or under-utilized, to maintain long-term economic and ecological stability. Scientists collect data and conduct surveys to determine fish populations, and then make recommendations about how many fish may be caught by commercial and…