By Carole Hayward
Posted on 2014-05-27
Middle and high school science teachers who seek engaging chances for their students to first watch something happen—and then become curious enough to explore and discover why—should check out two new books by authors Matthew Bobrowsky, Mikko Korhonen, and Jukka Kohtamäki. This trio has teamed up to write two experiment-rich books that offer students the opportunity to observe natural phenomena and then build scientific models and theories based on their observations.
According to the authors, these two books, Using Physical Science Gadgets and Gizmos (Grades 6-8) and Using Physics Gadgets and Gizmos (Grades 9-12), take an “approach to learning that is based on curiosity and creativity—a fun way to learn!”
Phenomenon-based learning (PBL) forms the pedagogical foundation for each of these books and is described as building learning on observations of real-world phenomena. Students conduct group exercises as well as draw group conclusions with the teacher serving as a guide and resource. (Another way to think of PBL is like a scientific puzzle: Each concept and phenomenon are pieces that ultimately fit together and develop a picture, which portrays the real situation.)
In offering 35 attention-grabbing experiences (such as a water rocket, fire syringe, a mirage, and energy balls) in Using Physical Science Gadgets and Gizmos, students will be able to:
In Using Physics Gadgets and Gizmos, the authors acknowledge that in science, there are many phenomena that are difficult at first to understand. The majority of physics books start with theory and then outline demonstrations and applications to follow. The reverse is true in this book. Rather than simple fact memorization, students will be doing real science using any number of the 54 experiments outlined in these books, which take them through pressure and force, laws of thermodynamics, energy, visible light and colors, resonance, buoyancy, two-dimension motion, angular momentum, magnetism, and electromagnetic induction.
The PBL approach to physics allows students to engage in collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, which support the goals of the Next Generation Science Standards. At the end of each chapter the authors provide a list of relevant standards from the NGSS to reinforce their focus on core ideas and practices of science vs. just the scientific facts.
If you’re looking to help your students grasp the “big picture” around physical science and/or physics, and you’ve already experimented with inquiry-, problem- or project-based learning, then the PBL approach to teaching and learning may be a natural next step for you.
Albert Einstein said it best: “The most beautiful thing that we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
These books are also available as e-books: Using Physical Science Gadgets and Gizmos (Grades 6-8) and Using Physics Gadgets and Gizmos (Grades 9-12).
By Juliana Texley
Posted on 2014-05-25
The world of a young child is full of “wow.” Children are constantly observing, exploring and discovering phenomena around them. From those activities they build models of how they think the world works and make predictions from those models. That’s the essence of science, although we seldom use that term for what we see our children do every day.
Early this year a select committee of early childhood experts and the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Board and Council came together to formulate a position statement emphasizing the vital importance of science learning in the preschool years. They reaffirmed a progression of experiences and skills that begins during ages 3 through 5 and its place in the overall mission of the association. And just last month the board of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) joined us by endorsing that statement. By sharing our perspectives and increasing the lines of communication between the associations, we begin an important collaboration.
Here are some key points from NSTA’s position statement, Early Childhood Science Education:
An endorsement by our partners at NAEYC is, of course, exciting. But that vote is just the beginning. We will be working both within the association and with all early childhood educators to increase our understanding of and resources for this important level.
NSTA has already begun to expand its publications at the early childhood level. Editor Linda Froschauer has introduced many more articles for this level in Science and Children, and a column by Peggy Ashcroft continues to support teachers there. Resources like Page Keeley’s Uncovering Student Ideas in Primary Science (NSTA, 2013) help teachers increase their sensitivity to preconceptions and address them with the sorts of progressive experiences needed at this age. Workshops are planned all year and further publications will follow. The association has also partnered with both NAEYC and the International Reading Association as exhibitors and participants in their conferences, with cordial invitations to come to us as well.
But there is a lot more to be done. It is true all too often that the educators of older students misunderstand or underestimate the vital importance of high quality early childhood science education. Here’s an example I encountered in a conversation not too long ago: I was discussing a measurement activity for kindergarten students with a secondary teacher, who asked: “Did you use metric or English units?” I responded that it didn’t matter if these explorers used feet, giant steps or anything else that was handy because both Common Core and best practice emphasize that at this stage the important thing is to teach that things can be measured. My colleague really didn’t agree, but our conversation was rich and perceptive. In the months to come NSTA won’t just be developing professional development for early childhood educators but for all levels about these topics.
Another area where we need much more work is in the evaluation of trade books for young children and the way this evaluation can drive the market. NSTA has worked with the Children’s Book Council for 44 years to develop selection criteria and use them to identify the best literature at every level. But the choices for early childhood remain limited. In all those years there have only been a handful of books on physical science for preschool use. The books that appear on the media’s “best seller” lists often don’t meet these criteria. This year we join with the International Reading Association and Science Books & Films to offer a “Celebration of Literacy” in Richmond, Virginia October 18. Hopefully, with our new partnerships things will change.
It’s exciting to be part of these new endeavors. Although much of my career was spent at the secondary level, I returned to school after two decades to gain accreditation for early childhood–an eye-opening experience. (I often told my secondary colleagues that I must have been teaching “developmental 9th grade” all along!) I recommend that everyone who cares about scientific literacy take the time to “begin at the beginning” and take the time to see the world through the eyes of young children. Ask “why”…and then “why not.”
(We’ve started a special forum on the topic of Early Childhood Science Education in the Learning Center. Come join us there to extend the conversation.)
The world of a young child is full of “wow.” Children are constantly observing, exploring and discovering phenomena around them. From those activities they build models of how they think the world works and make predictions from those models. That’s the essence of science, although we seldom use that term for what we see our children do every day.
By Mary Bigelow
Posted on 2014-05-22
At a professional development workshop several years ago, I heard a teacher say “I do lots of activities. My students are so busy, they don’t have time to think!” Her statement has haunted me to this day. I wondered what students learned by following someone else’s busy, fast-paced agenda of activities. It sounded exhausting, for both the teacher and the students.
Another time, I visited a classroom in a school that had 90-minute class periods. The teacher presented a series of activities, changing topics about every 15 minutes–lecture, worksheet, small group discussion, writing, hands-on activities, pop quizzes—but there was no segue between activities and no common theme or unifying concept. These students were also “busy,” but I wondered what they were actually learning from this series of disconnected events.
Fast forward to this week, when I read the article You Really Can ‘Work Smarter, Not Harder’ describing a study on the value of reflection. (Note: the primary source working paper Learning by Thinking: How Reflection Aids Performance from the Harvard Business School is available as a PDF file. According to the abstract of the study:
Research on learning has primarily focused on the role of doing (experience) in fostering progress over time. In this paper, we propose that one of the critical components of learning is reflection, or the intentional attempt to synthesize, abstract, and articulate the key lessons taught by experience. Drawing on dual-process theory, we focus on the reflective dimension of the learning process and propose that learning can be augmented by deliberately focusing on thinking about what one has been doing. We test the resulting dual-process learning model experimentally, using a mixed-method design that combines two laboratory experiments with a field experiment conducted in a large business process outsourcing company in India. We find a performance differential when comparing learning-by-doing alone to learning-by-doing coupled with reflection. Further, we hypothesize and find that the effect of reflection on learning is mediated by greater perceived self-efficacy. Together, our results shed light on the role of reflection as a powerful mechanism behind learning.
As with any study, there are problems generalizing the results to other populations, subject areas, and learning tasks. But it seems that doing hands-on activities or investigations is only part of the learning process; giving students time to process and think about what they are learning pays off.
Reflection doesn’t necessarily mean students staring into space (although that’s what I do when I’m thinking). Reflection involves articulating or summarizing what was learned, making personal connections to previous learning, and formulating questions for future learning. Science teachers often use notebooking, sketching, exit activities, or dictating into a smartphone or app for these reflections. For those teachers who already have students use reflective processes, it’s nice to have validations from more formal studies.
I suspect that most of our students need some examples and modeling of reflective thinking, along with a rationale as to why it is important to learning. This could be an interesting action research project for the classroom!
At a professional development workshop several years ago, I heard a teacher say “I do lots of activities. My students are so busy, they don’t have time to think!” Her statement has haunted me to this day. I wondered what students learned by following someone else’s busy, fast-paced agenda of activities. It sounded exhausting, for both the teacher and the students.
By Lauren Jonas, NSTA Assistant Executive Director
Posted on 2014-05-19
Authors and designers of books by the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) Press cover the content science teachers need, so it’s no wonder that the outsides of the books are as impressive as the insides. We are pleased to announce that four NSTA book covers have received honors from the 2014 Washington Book Publishers Design and Effectiveness Awards. Congratulations to the following authors and designers!
Citizen Science: 15 Lessons That Bring Biology to Life, 6-12
Edited by Nancy Trautmann, Jennifer Fee, Terry M. Tomasek, and NancyLee R. Bergey
Cover designed by Joe Butera
What Are They Thinking? Promoting Elementary Learning Through Formative Assessment
By Page Keeley
Cover designed by Rashad Muhammad
Using Physics Gadgets and Gizmos, Grades 9-12: Phenomenon-Based Learning
By Matthew Bobrowsky, Mikko Korhonen, and Jukka Kohtamäki
Cover designed by Joe Butera
Science for the Next Generation: Preparing for the New Standards
Edited by William Banko, Marshall L. Grant, Michael E. Jabot, Alan J. McCormack, and Thomas O’Brien
Cover designed by Joe Butera
More About NSTA Press
By Peggy Ashbrook
Posted on 2014-05-18
The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has endorsed the National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) new position statement on Early Childhood Science Education. Thank you to all the individuals who brought these two professional organizations together to promote excellence in teaching science in early childhood! To get a deeper understanding of how the position statement can benefit your teaching, listen to the Lab Out Loud! podcast interview with early childhood educator and researcher Karen Worth, and read Cindy Hoisington’s column in the online Young Children, “On Our Minds: Promoting Teaching About Science in the Early Years.”
The column begins with a peek into the thoughts of a preschool teacher and goes on to describe the development of the NSTA position statement. Hoisington writes, “The statement also incorporates an appreciation for the unique developmental characteristics and needs of young children. The statement emphasizes that children need frequent and varied opportunities to engage in exploration and discovery and that they develop an understanding of concepts through experiential learning that occurs over long periods of time and in home, classroom, and community settings. At the same time, the statement invites teachers to reflect on how they might extend the science activities they currently do to include more opportunities for exploration and discovery.”
Join the NAEYC’S Early Childhood Science Interest Forum (ECSIF), communicate with others on the ECSIF Facebook page and read more on the ECSIF blog.
To participate (or lurk) in another early childhood science education online community, register for the NSTA Learning Center and read/post/reply to the posts on the Early Childhood public forum. Helpful comments share resources and questions. For a supportive early childhood science education community, join NSTA and sign up for the early childhood email listserv at http://www.nsta.org/membership/listserver.aspx
Since I’m urging you to share your practice with other early childhood teachers, it’s only fair that I do the same. In the past month I’ve worked with teachers and children to examine and make observations of the common dandelion plants; make observations of leaf shapes; helped children plant seeds and watched pharmacists explain how drinking a liquid with pills will help the pills dissolve (USA Festival of Science & Engineering); and worked with second-graders as they designed, built and tested moving objects on ramp structures. Very satisfying work!
The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) has endorsed the National Science Teachers Association’s (NSTA) new position statement on Early Childhood Science Education. Thank you to all the individuals who brought these two professional organizations together to promote excellence in teaching science in early childhood!
By Peggy Ashbrook
Posted on 2014-05-15
By David Beacom, NSTA Publisher
Posted on 2014-05-14
This is Children’s Book Week—and 2014 is, incredibly, the 95th year for the annual celebration. A bit more recently—in 1954, a mere 60 years ago, Sister Marian taught her entire first-grade class of 66 students how to read. I should know—I was one of that good woman’s lucky pupils. By the way, the sheer size of that single classroom (Sister Madeline’s first grade across the hall was even bigger, with 70 kids) certainly illustrates the term “Baby Boom” better than any other example I could possibly cite.
Anyway, since Sister Marian got me launched on a lifelong exploration into the realm of books in particular and the world of words in general (Hey, some of my favorite reading in the ’50s ran to the backs of cereal boxes or magazine ads for “X-ray Goggles” that I ordered by mail and waited for for weeks), countless children’s books have been written and illustrated to lure generations of children into embarking upon the very same journey.
In celebration of this special week, the Huffington Post created an honor roll of the 50 best kids books published in the last 25 years. In addition, the New York Times Book Review devoted several pages of its recent issue to 26 of the best new books for kids.
Both resources are rich in stories—fictional adventures touchingly told and illustrated with almost magical artistry.
But, over time, I’ve become a bit of a science guy (Amateur Division)—working for decades at the National Geographic Society, then for the past dozen years or so as the publisher at the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA). So I look at these resources from that perspective, and they both come up… a little short. The Huff Post list includes, at best, a half-dozen nonfiction titles of any sort, with little focus on the honest, true-facts wonders of the world we actually live in. The special Times section on kids’ books does better on the nonfiction side—their half-dozen includes a history, a couple biographies, and three charming works that take young readers step-by-step through the annual cycle of seasons. Well-done.
But hardly enough, especially with the heavy emphasis on nonfiction reading in classrooms today. Which is why I took keypad in hand today to write my first-ever blog post.
Because I need to tell you that, since 1973, NSTA has worked with the Children’s Book Council (anchor sponsor of Children’s Book Week) to identify an annual list of Outstanding Science Trade Books for children. For my more-knowledgeable colleagues at NSTA, this is a yearly (and impressively well-informed) labor of love. We gather some of the best volunteers in the field of science education, people who’ve been in the trenches and know what they’re talking about, to review hundreds and hundreds of books each year. Then, every fall, they come together in our offices to whittle their final selections down to just a few dozen of the best of the best.
Of course: They look for accurate, informative, and engaging science content. Even more important: They only award top honors to books that will truly help encourage kids to love reading. Precisely what Sister Marian (and Sister Madeline, for that matter) set out to accomplish decades ago.
Just yesterday, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote touchingly of the importance he placed on instilling a love of reading in his young nieces and nephews (Read, Kids, Read). But he also went beyond emotion to the realm of research, citing “a recent article in The Guardian by Dan Hurley, who wrote that after ‘three years interviewing psychologists and neuroscientists around the world,’ he’d concluded that ‘reading and intelligence have a relationship so close as to be symbiotic.’”
In my case, that’s no doubt an over-statement. But for the young people in your life, it’s comfortably close to incontrovertible fact. So, please, to help them along their path, check out our latest list of Outstanding Science Trade Books. You—and all the dedicated teachers of today—will be glad you did.
This is Children’s Book Week—and 2014 is, incredibly, the 95th year for the annual celebration. A bit more recently—in 1954, a mere 60 years ago, Sister Marian taught her entire first-grade class of 66 students how to read. I should know—I was one of that good woman’s lucky pupils.
By Lauren Jonas, NSTA Assistant Executive Director
Posted on 2014-05-13
NSTA offers congratulations and gratitude to the authors, designers, reviewers, and editors of Science and Children, NSTA’s elementary level science education journal. Science and Children recently received the Silver EXCEL Award for design excellence in the journals category from Association Media & Publishing (AM&P). This year’s awards competition received more than 900 entries across numerous publications categories. The awards event will be held in May at AM&P’s Annual Meeting—we’ll bring you updates then! Learn more about this awards program at the AM&P website. Want to see what the buzz is all about? Browse the journal online to read articles, view online extras, and access the archives.
NSTA offers congratulations and gratitude to the authors, designers, reviewers, and editors of Science and Children, NSTA’s elementary level science education journal.
By Lauren Jonas, NSTA Assistant Executive Director
Posted on 2014-05-13
Congratulations to the authors and to the NSTA Press staff for their recently announced 2014 Gold EXCEL Award from Association Media and Publishing (AM&P). The following book won the Non-Technical Book Gold Award this year: Even More Picture-Perfect Science Lessons: Using Children’s Books to Guide Inquiry, K-5, by Emily Morgan and Karen Ansberry. This book is the third volume in the Picture-Perfect Science Series, which is designed to help elementary teachers combine the appeal of children’s picture books with key science concepts to capture the interest of young scientists and blend science with reading in a natural way. Science education leader Rodger Bybee has written of the series, “Karen Ansberry and Emily Morgan present the science education community with a refreshing and positive remedy to the reduction of science teaching in elementary schools…. The authors have contributed to the goal of more and better science instruction in elementary schools in the United States.” This year’s awards competition received more than 900 entries across numerous publications categories. The awards event will be held in May at AM&P’s Annual Meeting—and we’ll bring you updates then! Learn more about this awards program at the AM&P website. Want a peek inside this award-winning book? Browse a free chapter (The Wind Blew).
By Mary Bigelow
Posted on 2014-05-12
Questions and discussions about safety are often seen in the NSTA e-mail listserves and discussion forums. Each month, columns on safety in the science lab are featured in NSTA’s Science Scope (Scope on Safety) and The Science Teacher (Safer Science). These columns are written by Ken Roy, Director of Environmental Health and Safety for Glastonbury Public Schools in Glastonbury, CT, and NSTA’s Science Safety Compliance Consultant.
These are relevant for all K-12 science teachers and school administrators, regardless of what grade level or science course you teach. And NSTA members have access to them, regardless of which print journal you receive. I’ve collected these into a Resource Collection through NSTA’s Learning Center:
Each month, Scope on Safety also includes a Q&A on a safety-related issue. If you’re looking for a science department discussion topic, take your pick (I’d advise the ones on food for starters)! For more on safety topics, go to NSTA’s SciLinks and use “safety” as the keyword.
Graphic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/epicfireworks/3646350410