Although teaching laboratories offer students the opportunity to act and think like chemists, in many cases students simply follow written procedures to generate predetermined outcomes. In recent years, there has been a movement toward inquiry-, problem-, and discovery-based learning. In a similar vein, the first-semester introductory organic…

Michael Faraday is considered one of the greatest science lecturers in history. He popularized the Christmas Lectures as a format of science communication that has survived until today in the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Especially, his "Chemical History of a Candle" has become a classic of science communication that has inspired…

In a series of 12 project-based learning lessons, a group of seven fifth-grade students who live 200 miles from the coast explored their personal connections to the ocean. After completing a unit on the role of water in Earth's surface processes, the students investigated ocean acidification and how this pervasive ocean problem impacts their local…

Although research and new technologies have introduced different ways of observing microorganisms, including scanning and electron microscopy, these methods are expensive and require equipment that is typically not found in a middle school classroom. The transmission-through-dye technique (TTD; Gregg et al., 2010), a new optical microscopy method…

As well-developed as they may be, standards are not curriculum. It is the job of teachers and curriculum teams to use the Standards as the basis for designing the specific pathway for teaching and learning. In this article, the authors explore the use of Understanding by Design (UbD), a widely-used curriculum development framework, for honoring…

The aim of this research was to explore the effect of a Technology-enhanced Metacognitive Learning Platform (TeMLP) on student's monitoring accuracy and understanding of electricity. An interactive TeMLP was prepared on the electricity unit covering the topics of static and current electricityfor 7th graders; the platform contained computer…

Alternative farming techniques are often more efficient and conserve resources more effectively than conventional farming, which can harm the environment with pesticides and synthetic fertilizers (Pimental 2005). To learn the theory, application, and related science concepts of sustainable farming techniques, students can collaborate to create an…

This article describes an interdisciplinary unit in which students explore biological "ice nucleation"--by particles that cause water to freeze at temperatures above -38°C--through the lens of the microbial ice nucleator "Pseudomonas syringae." Such This activity, which aligns with the "Next Generation Science…

Carbon is at the heart of many of today's environmental challenges. It is the central element responsible for the structure and function of living systems--taken up by plants through photosynthesis and moving from plants to other organisms, soil, and the ocean and into the atmosphere. The imbalance of these connected biogeochemical…

Triadic dialogue, the Initiation, Response, Evaluation sequence typical of teacher /student interactions in classrooms, has long been identified as a barrier to students' access to learning, including science learning. A large body of research on the subject has over the years led to projects and policies aimed at increasing opportunities for…

Tomlinson's explanation of Artful Teaching and her 2017 expansion of this concept The Five Key Elements of Differentiation provide the theoretical framework of this examination of the need for science investigations in elementary schools. The Artful Teaching framework uses an equilateral triangle with vertices labeled The Teacher, The Student, and…

Creative learning is discussed with respect to a specific physics topic. A teaching example, based on an apparatus that demonstrates the standard dynamo model of geomagnetism, is presented. It features many of the basic physics concepts within the syllabus of electromagnetism at high-school and university. To stimulate conceptual learning and to…

Students receive a more complete conception of scientific cognition methods if they reproduce fundamentally important historical investigations on their own. Ohm's investigation realized in 1826 is one of these. This paper presents a simple and accessible experimental unit, in which Ohm's ideas are implemented with the help of modern…

Recent and exciting discoveries in astronomy and cosmology have inspired many high school students to learn about these fields. A particularly fascinating consequence of general relativity at the forefront of modern cosmology research is gravitational lensing, the bending of light rays that pass near massive objects. Gravitational lensing enables…

Powerful online visualizations can make unobservable scientific phenomena visible and improve student understanding. Instead, they often confuse or mislead students. To clarify the impact of molecular visualizations for middle school students we explored three design variations implemented in a Web-based Inquiry Science Environment (WISE) unit on…