One of my favorite benefits of being an NSTA member is being able to view all of the journals electronically, even though I must confess that I do like the feel of holding an actual book or magazine. I subscribe to the hard copies of The Science Teacher and Science Scope, being a veteran secondary teacher. I toss the latest issues into a briefcase to read articles in between meetings, on the train, or in the car (NOT while I’m driving, of course!). But I also enjoy and get a lot out of reading Science and Children online for ideas and insights. And I have used/modified some of these ideas with my secondary students.
Sometimes I wonder about the artificial boundaries we create as teachers: elementary vs. secondary, K-12 vs. higher education, middle school vs. high school. Having been an educator at all of these levels, I’ve found that we have more similarities than differences. I hope that NSTA members take a few minutes to browse the table of contents for the journals that are beyond their own teaching assignments. I know that we’re all stressed for time, but you can skim the table of contents to identify a few articles of interest to download and read later. On the NSTA home page, use the links in the “Choose Your Classroom” list to get to the current issues of NSTA journals for elementary, middle school, high school, and college.
College? I suspect that many K-12 teachers don’t look at the Journal of College Science Teaching, but this is another excellent resource. It’s interesting that some of the articles in this higher education publication are about topics and issues with which all of us in K-12 can identify. For example, in the November issue, there are articles about team dynamics in cooperative learning, the use of learning contracts, and a case study on using “clicker” response systems in class. Even though the students described in these articles are older and bigger, there are a lot of commonalities with science education at all levels. Best of all, unlike some higher education publications, the articles in JCST are very readable, not written in “journalese.”
You can download journal articles directly to your desktop. Or you can take advantage of NSTA’s Learning Center to save the articles in your own online library of articles and other resources. Do you have a “library” yet? Mine is getting longer each month!