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Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about light and the Moon. The probe is designed to find out what students think is the source of a full Moon's light....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about eclipses. The probe is designed to find out what students think causes a lunar eclipse....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about weight and pressure. The probe is designed to determine whether students think their weight changes when the force exerted per unit area (pressure) on a scale changes....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about magnetism. The probe is specifically designed to determine whether students believe air is necessary for magnets to work....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about dissolving. The probe is designed to find out what students think happens to sugar when it dissolves in water....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about food, transformation of matter, growth and development, conservation of mass, and systems. The concepts underlying this probe are complex. It is not important that students know ...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about biological adaptation. The probe is designed to find out if students think animals intentionally adapt to a change in their environment....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about crystalline solids.The probe is specifically designed to determine how students think atoms are arranged and move in a crystalline lattice....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about biological evolution. The probe is designed to find out if students distinguish the theory of biological evolution from ideas about the origin of life and the mechanism for biolo...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about the effect of solar radiation on Earth's temperature. The probe is designed to find out whether students realize the Earth continues to cool after sundown and up to sunrise until...
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about conservation of matter during combustion. The probe is designed to find out if students think the mass changes as paper burns inside a closed system....
Book Chapter
The purpose of this assessment probe is to elicit students' ideas about temperature in the context of phases of matter. The probe is designed to find out if students recognize that the temperature of a substance does not change when two phases are pr...
Book Chapter
If students develop an understanding of how science inquiry is done and how it contributes to understanding the natural world, they will be better prepared to analyze and interpret information throughout their lives. Merely telling students how knowl...
Book Chapter
Ethology—the study of animal behavior—combines the observational skills of a natural historian with modern insights from ecologists, geneticists, and especially evolutionary biologists. In this unit, students discover more of the behavior reperto...
Book Chapter
The ultimate function of most physiological processes is to help organisms maintain overall homeostasis, while letting them adapt to changes in internal and external environments. In this unit, heart rate is the model for studying homeostasis. The st...