JoinAll Book Chapters
Book Chapter
Why Do They Have to Gum Everything Up With Those Letters?
Often people who are relatively comfortable doing math with numbers completely freak out when variables (you know, those letters that take the place of numbers) come into the picture. Things start looking much more abstract and complicated. You don...
Book Chapter
All Things Being Equal...Or Not
Now that we've covered at least a few examples of how we get equations from the physical world, it's time to work on solving those equations. Solving an equation means figuring out what values of the unknowns (the variables) will make the equality a...
Book Chapter
Book Chapter
Pie are not Round; <i>π</i>²
What would a math book be without a nerdy math joke? Bad joke aside, you might recognize π² as the formula for the area of a circle. And you might infer from that fact that this chapter addresses geometry. Often people think of geometry as a b...
Book Chapter
Although faster-than-light travel is commonplace in science fiction, ordinary matter in the ordinary world must obey the laws of physics. The speed of light is the speed limit in the Universe. Only massless particles such as photons can travel at t...
Book Chapter
Building on the Natural Wonder Inherent in Us All
The Gladbrook-Reinbeck School District is located in Iowa, a state of just over three million people. The rich farmland that surrounds the district produces corn, beans, cattle, swine, and proud hardworking people. Naturally, many of the businesses ...
Book Chapter
Teaching Science With Student Thinking in Mind
This chapter describes the Discover Lab Concept (DLC), a project that began in a teaching/learning laboratory at Stony Brook University, and today is a foundation of science instruction in classrooms on Long Island and regions beyond. The chapter des...
Book Chapter
Unlocking the National Science Education Standards With IMaST
The National Science Foundation funded the IMaST project for three consecutive developmental cycles to design an integrated middle school curriculum. As a developmental research project, the IMaST developed 16 standards-based curriculum modules that ...
Book Chapter
Achieving a Vision of Inquiry: Rigorous, Engaging Curriculum and Instruction
The changing emphases of the National Science Education Standards (NSES) have spurred many school districts to reinvent their science programs. New curricula development by National Science Foundation-funded programs have been at the core of some dis...
Book Chapter
Adapting the JASON Project: Real Science, Real Time, Real Learning
The JASON Project is a multidisciplinary curriculum involving real science studies and comparing them to local studies performed by students. The Plymouth Public School System, located on the south shore of Massachusetts, adopted the JASON Project as...
Book Chapter
"Re-Inventing" Science Instruction: Inquiry-Based Instruction in a Fifth/Sixth-Grade Classroom
The author's purpose in sharing her experiences in this monograph is to help other teachers who may be less confident in teaching science than they are teaching other subjects, to help them see the value in what the Standards envision for students, a...
Book Chapter
What Do We Get to Do Today? The Middle School Full Option Science System Program
This chapter presents the Full Option Science System (FOSS) and the features that address the four National Science Education Standards (NSES). With FOSS curriculum students are introduced to content through exploration of and asking questions about ...
Book Chapter
ARIES: Science as Discovery . . . and Discovery as Science!
This chapter presents Project ARIES, developed at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and funded by the National Science Foundation, with additional support from Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution. ARIES is a modular, astr...
Book Chapter
The 15 previous stories give evidence of the Standards' impact, along with important examples for others for improvements they might consider if they want to move in directions like those advanced by the persons involved in preparing the Standards. A...
Book Chapter
In light of the increasing emphasis placed on the importance of teachers and their actions and the reality that we have an inadequate pool of qualified science and mathematics teachers to meet our needs, many reform efforts and funding initiatives fo...