Stability and change; gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data; and science for all—these are the themes of the April/May 2015 journal articles from the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). Browse through the thought-provoking selections below and learn more about the power of water, what happens when an environment changes, using authentic data, myths about English Language Learners, and other important topics in K–12 science education.

Science and Children

While stability and change are phenomena that we deal with frequently within many science concepts, they are rarely pointed out or emphasized. This issue of Science and Children offers ideas for helping students identify when they recognize these elements within the investigations and when it is appropriate to use these terms.

Featured articles (please note, only those marked “free” are available to nonmembers without a fee):

• A Constant of Change
• Free – Editor’s Note: Stability and Change
• Free – Ring! Ring! Science Calling!
• Science 101: How Does Stable Equilibrium Differ From Other Kinds of Equilibrium?
• The Power of Water
• What Happens When An Environment Changes?
• Full Table of Contents

Science Scope

Gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data are at the heart of doing science. In this issue we offer a variety of activities you can use with your students to engage them with real-world data as they explore different science topics. We hope they will help your students make better sense of the world around them.

Featured articles (please note, only those marked “free” are available to nonmembers without a fee):

• “Nor Any Drop to Drink” Students Engineer Solutions for Desalinating Ocean Water
• Free – Editor’s Roundtable: 3-4-8: A Winning Combination for Science Instruction
• Free – Exploring Sound! Using Tablets in Middle School Science
• Let Them Eat Cake …OE-Cake!
• Teaching With Tarantulas
• Using Authentic Data to Enhance Middle School Atmospheric Science Instruction
• Using the Scientific Process to Engage Students With Our Changing Planet
• Full Table of Contents

The Science Teacher

This issue of The Science Teacher marks our 20th consecutive annual issue devoted to the theme of “Science for All.” Teaching strategies targeted toward a specific group almost always turn out to improve learning for all groups. And so, when this issue suggests ways to use quality graphics to support English language learners or provides ideas for using videos to engage reluctant readers, you will also discover ideas that work for all students who struggle to read science texts. Likewise, in an article describing strategies to support students with weak executive functioning skills, you will find ways to improve all your students’ organization, planning, and self-regulation abilities. High-quality teaching strategies like those in this issue benefit students well beyond the targeted groups.

YouTube fans, watch high school science teacher and TST Field Editor, Steve Metz, introduce this month’s issue.

Featured articles (please note, only those marked “free” are available to nonmembers without a fee):

• Dialogs for Success
• Free – Editor’s Corner: Science for All Turns 20!
• Giving Students a Leg Up
• Free – Making Molecular Movies
• Myths About English Language Learning
• Picture Perfect
• Full Table of Contents

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In my neighborhood, flowing rainwater from rooftops and yards is making a small gully in the hillside before it runs into the street and goes into the storm sewer. The hillside used to be just a grassy slope. As the original bare patch deepened, roots and rocks became visible in the soil. I wondered what changes in the neighborhood made this happen? The neighborhood is a system of surfaces where rain falls and flows off on its way to the river—roof tops, downspouts, drainage pipes to direct the water, trees, grass yards, garden slopes, sidewalks and roads. What changes in this system led to the erosion of the hillside?

Maybe your children can see the changes made by rain or wind in their local environment. Observing these changes can help us think of our neighborhood and environment as a system. “A system is an organized group of related objects or components that form a whole. (NRC 1996).”

A common and simple system that children work with in early childhood programs is the structure they build from blocks. Teachers have a role in supporting children’s work in block building. Professional organizations that support teaching science, The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), provide some resources (some at no cost) to help us understand how to maximize children’s learning in the block area. The topic of the March issue of Young Children is “Blocks: Great Learning Tools From Infancy Through the Primary Grades.” Two of the articles available to non-members address block building in preschool: Building Bridges to Understanding in a Preschool Classroom: A Morning in the Block Center by Lea Ann Christenson and Jenny James, and Using Blocks to Develop 21st Century Skills by Karen Wise Lindeman and Elizabeth McKendry Anderson.

Susan Friedman, Executive Editor of Digital Content at NAEYC, reminisced about the materials on the block shelves in her first classroom on the NAEYC blog—add your comment to describe your block area and how the children use it.

In the Early Years column in the April/May 2015 Science and Children, I wrote about exploring stability and change in other systems common in early childhood. There are many ways to investigate stability and change in both natural and built worlds. Block building learning in a Head Start classroom is described by Chalufour, Hoisington, Moriarty, Winokur, and Worth in “The Science and Mathematics of Building Structures” in Science and Children (2004).

In block building, children choose the objects or components that form the whole, often making changes as they build to meet their goals of stability, aesthetics and usefulness. “I’m building a road,” a child says, and drives a small model of a car along it. Another child builds a house alongside the road, and then a bridge to go over the road when more children join in building on the other side of the road. Children make changes as they respond to the needs of their imagined community to get across the road. The need to consider balance and stability increases as children build up. Although children control the objects in their built system, they may not yet understand what makes their structure stable.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS Lead States 2013) state that the progression of understanding of the crosscutting concept Stability and Change begins in kindergarten–grade 2 as “students observe some things stay the same while other things change, and things may change slowly or rapidly” (p. 10). An additional goal stated by A Framework for K–12 Science Education is to help children recognize that it can be as important to ask why something does not change as it is to ask why it does (NRC 2012, p. 101).

Even in second grade, children may be working out how to build a stable tower. In a 1-hour after-school class to explore building ramps to create marble runs, several children in grade 2 tried over and over to support a ramp with a long rectangular block standing on one end. They repeated this process for several weeks although they could see more stable tall structures built by other children and I asked them to think about what they could change to keep their structure from falling over. After more several weeks and pairing with another student, these children are now building stable tall structures. They needed time to construct their understanding through repeated experiences. (More information about building ramp structures can be found on the Regents’ Center for Early Developmental Education’s CEESTEM website at http://www.uni.edu/rampsandpathways/ )

If girls in your program rarely play with blocks, or boys rarely play in the imaginative play center, Janis Strasser and Lisa Mufson Koeppel have some tips for encouraging children to try out the centers they do not usually visit. 

In “A Developmental Look at a Rigorous Block Play Program” by Diane Hobenshield Tepylo, Joan Moss, and Carol Stephenson, the authors examine the block play in a prekindergarten class, and encourage us to create a carefully considered block program. 

Where do your children investigate stability and change in systems?

Resources

Chalufour, Ingrid and Hoisington, Cindy; Moriarty, Robin; Winokur, Jeff; Worth, Karen. 2004. The Science and Mathematics of Building Structures. Science and Children. 41 (4): 30-34 http://www.nsta.org/publications/article.aspx?id=ZacGSosEPpc=

Lindeman, Karen Wise and Elizabeth McKendry Anderson. 2015. Using Blocks to Develop 21st Century Skills. Young Children 70 (1): 36-43. http://www.naeyc.org/yc/article/using_blocks_develop_21st_century_skills_Lindeman

National Research Council (NRC). 2012. A Framework for K–12 Science Education: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Core Ideas. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/13165/a-framework-for-k-12-science-education-practices-crosscutting-concepts

National Research Council (NRC). 1996. National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press. http://www.nap.edu/catalog/4962/national-science-education-standards

NGSS Lead States. 2013. Next Generation Science Standards: For states, by states. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. http://www.nextgenscience.org/next-generation-science-standards

Strasser, Janis and Lisa Mufson Koeppel. 2010. Block Building and Make Believe for Every Child. Teaching Young Children. 3 (3): 14-15. http://www.naeyc.org/yc/files/yc/file/201503/YC0315_Tepylo.pdf

Tepylo, Diane Hobenshield, and Joan Moss and Carol Stephenson. 2015. A Developmental Look at a Rigorous Block Play Program. Young Children 70 (1): 18-25. http://www.naeyc.org/yc/files/yc/file/201503/YC0315_Tepylo.pdf

Do you have any suggestions on how to help students review and apply what they learn during a unit? I’ve tried creating games and contests, but the students don’t seem to get much out of them.   —C., Minnesota

Many teachers have special review sessions prior to a test. With my middle and high school students, I found a few issues with this practice:

• Some students became so dependent on reviews that they would say, “I was absent for the review session. Do I have to take the test now?”
• The traditional games often focus on factual knowledge or vocabulary, even though the assessments had items that required higher-level thinking.
• The games and other activities took time to create, find, or adapt, and I was the one doing this. The students had little ownership in the review process.
• Even though the students enjoyed the games, they didn’t always realize that the purpose was to reinforce their learning or apply the concepts.

So I changed my plans to incorporate periodic review sessions, rather than a marathon one at the end of the unit. Here are some review activities that involved students, seemed to be most helpful for them, and did not take a lot of planning time.

The specialized vocabulary in science is a challenge for students. These activities required students to do more than match a word with a definition:

• Word Splash: Using a prepared set of words or a list generated in class, teams of students write sentences that include two or more of the words, demonstrating how they can relate and use them. Each team chooses 2-3 of their “best” sentences to share with the whole class to debrief. You can also challenge students to write an entire story using the words or do this as a gallery walk. http://nstacommunities.org/blog/2012/11/28/gallery-walks-for-middle-school/
• Word Sort: Give word lists to teams of students to categorize or match. They must provide a rationale of their thinking.

Ask students throughout the unit to create questions as a review, putting a question on one side of an index card with the response on the reverse. I found the students focused more on lower level questions. So I took cubes (I found blank ones in a craft store) and the students wrote (or pasted) six question starters Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How on them. The students, working in teams, rolled the cube and used the starter that came out on top. (If a unit did not focus on Who concepts, students used Why or How instead.) We passed the sets around during other review sessions. If a team came up with a response that was different from the one on the card or if the given response was incomplete or incorrect, they could add it (after checking it out with me and the original writers). We used these during the unit, adding to the stack after each topic, and also at other times when there were a few minutes left over in class or before a major holiday break. The students also enjoyed looking at the responses and trying to figure out the questions.

Another successful strategy was having students create “info cards.” For every unit the students each had a 4X6 index card and could write down whatever information they wanted from their notes or other references. They were allowed to refer to the cards during the test (there were very few recall items on the test). I collected the cards with the test papers so that students could not “share” their cards.

The students soon realized that they had to actually review their notes and other resources to create the card. They had to select important information, summarize, prioritize, and decide what they did or did not know–important, higher-level skills. One student remarked that making the cards was the most time he ever spent reviewing (and he had good test results to show for it).

I also observed that by having some information available during the test, the students’ responses to open-ended questions were much improved. Looking at the cards also gave me some feedback on what the students considered important. Afterwards, I asked the students to incorporate the cards into their notebooks for future reference.

These activities also served as a type of formative assessment. As students worked on them, I could circulate around the room and observe their work, looking for misconceptions, misunderstandings, or incomplete understandings.

Photo:   http://www.flickr.com/photos/rongyos/2686415336/