It will soon be the time when many schools go into Science Fair mode, with reactions from students (and perhaps some teachers) that range from cheers of excitement to groans of despair. This month’s Science and Children should be required reading for any teacher whose students are going to be involved in science fairs. I also would encourage secondary teachers to review these articles, especially if your students are novices at science fairs or if you’re looking for some fresh ideas.
The S&C editor notes that when she Googled “science fair” there were more than 2 million entries! Fortunately for SciLinks users, if you enter “science fair” in the keyword search you’ll get a manageable list of 21 sites to get you and your students started!
Getting started was the hardest part for my students. The Science Buddies website has a “topic selection wizard” that guides students through the process of selecting and fine-tuning a topic. This site has sections that can help students with planning a project and teachers with planning a science fair (including rubrics for evaluating projects). If you only have time for one site (and not 2 million), this should be it!
The authors of the S&C article Four Tools for Science Fair Success also recommend Science Buddies, and the article has timelines, rubrics, and suggestions for helping students who may not have resources at home. Other articles in this issue discuss topics such as involving kindergarten students and conducting online science fairs or science expos.
There’s been a lot of talk recently that a lockstep “Scientific Method” is not always how real scientists conduct investigations, as the author of the Science 101 article describes. The article More Than One Way to Investigate illustrates the differences between experimental and descriptive studies and how both are authentic ways to study science.
For students who do a experiment for their projects, the authors of the archived Science Scope article Non-Traditional Characteristics of a Successful Science Fair Project describe six characteristics of high quality projects, and they include a rubric for assessing a student’s presentation.
You may also want to check out the resources that are part of the website of the National History Day competition. Although the topics are different, the resources include a questionnaire to help students decide whether to do an individual or a group project. This competition has several categories that reflect the authentic work of historians: documentary, exhibit, paper, performance. Each category has its own rubric. These resources could be modified for your science fair. If you’ve ever been to a NHD showcase, you won’t find any pretzel-stick log cabins! These students are doing history, just as your students will do science. (I hope your school does not require students to do both history and science projects at the same time!)
If you’ve never been involved in a science fair before, the Georgia Department of Education website has resources to help you plan and organize a science fair, from student worksheets, letters to parents, a template for a program booklet, timelines, and examples of rubrics.
With these articles and the related SciLinks websites, you and your students should be ready to go!

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!

This month’s issue has a theme that is appealing to most middle school students – the human body.
The article Choice, Control, and Change has a SciLinks, code for “Investigate good health” SS110701. This leads to a list of sites related to health issues such as obesity, vaccines, diet, and dental health. But if you want information on specific anatomy and/or physiology topics, you’ll have to dig a little deeper.
If you’ve never tried this, here is your assignment! After logging in to SciLinks, if you’re a registered user (not a guest), you get the chance to enter in a keyword such as “Blood” or “Circulatory System.” The other option is to do a search by NSES standard (National Science Education Standards). Choose a subject, topic, and grade level. Try “Life Science” as the subject, “Structure and Function in Living Systems” as the topic, and “5-8” as the grade level. You’ll get a list of all of the keywords for websites that are correlated to this very broad topic. As you scroll down, you’ll see topics such as Body Systems, Blood, Circulatory System, and Tissues and Organs. Click on a topic to get the SciLinks list of websites. Let me know in a comment if you have any trouble doing this.
When I taught seventh-grade life science, one of my essential questions was “What adaptations do living things have to sense and respond to their surroundings?” The first unit we did was on the human nervous system, including the brain and sense organs. The students were fascinated by this, and this unit was a good context to review what they knew (or didn’t know) about cells and tissues. We then looked at other animal phyla, from the simplest to the most complex, using this question and knowledge of the human nervous system as a framework. My favorite investigation was “What stimuli do earthworms react to?
To help student learn about the human nervous system, you won’t go wrong with Neuroscience for Kids. This website has recently been updated and is even better than the first time I saw it. This site could easily be the basis for comprehensive unit on the nervous system.

As part of a project I am working on, I was visiting the science classes of teachers who participated in a summer professional education project. One of the elementary teachers indicated that I should wait until April to visit hers. She said that in her school, they didn’t teach science until after the state reading and math tests were over in the spring!
Although this is (I hope) an extreme example, it seems that science, social studies, and the arts are being cut back to provide more reading time, at least in some elementary and middle schools. Maybe as a veteran secondary teacher I’m asking a silly question, but why can’t reading (and writing) skills be taught in the context of subjects such as science, social studies, and the arts?
In this issue of Science & Children, there are several articles on just this topic. The Reading and Science article makes two interesting points. For those who wonder if hands-on activities discourage or replace reading, the author cites research that shows the opposite. In more stimulating settings, student motivation to read increases. The author also describes “authentic reading” as reading for a purpose. Students who engaged in purposeful reading improved in their comprehension. I’m curious as to how much emphasis there is on nonfiction reading in our classrooms, which is what most of this authentic reading would be.
Another article poses the question How is reading science books different from reading other kinds of books?” The focus on fluency in reading (words per minute) may be counterproductive in reading science texts, where science reading is a slower process, and going back to reread a section is appropriate. Are students being instructed and guided in these processes?
I hope that secondary teachers will look at these two articles. I wonder if many of the reading “problems” in secondary students are in reality a lack of guidance and experience in reading these informational texts? I know that secondary teachers feel that reading instruction is not their job. I would agree that if secondary students cannot decode words, there is a need for intervention by reading specialists. But I’m not convinced that it’s the job of a reading or language arts teachers to teach students how to read science texts, to instruct students in specialized science vocabulary, or to teach students how to write lab reports. Who better to do this than science teachers?
Making sense of science textbooks and web resources requires another type of literacy – visual literacy. Think of how science uses nonlinguistic representations – symbols on a weather map, the Periodic Table, chemical equations, Punnet Squares, molecular diagrams, formulas, graphs, diagrams, maps (the list goes on!). With all due and utmost respect to my colleagues in the Language Arts/Reading department, I’m not sure that they are the right folks to teach my science students how to interpret and create these representations.
Regardless of the grade level, one of the best ways to help students interact with these texts is by modeling. It doesn’t require a lot of professional development to do a “think aloud” and make your thinking process visible (and audible) to students. For examples, our textbooks are now full of graphics that support the content, but many students do not always see the relationships between the graphics and the text. It’s been my experience that taking a little time to model how to see these relationships may be what students need to eventually become more independent readers.
There are many web resources that can help you. We’ve created a new SciLinks, Keyword “Reading and Writing in Science,” and we’ll be adding some teacher resources for this. In the meantime, here are two sites that are good ones to start with: Think Aloud and Strategies for Effective Use of Science Reading Materials
I saw a college professor of physics doing a “think aloud” with a group of elementary teachers. He was modeling how to interpret graphs and to see the story that the graph was telling about their investigations. It took a few minutes of the classtime, but the teachers understood and were then able to apply the skill to other graphs.

I’ve described a few components of the SciLinks rubric so far: the accuracy and appropriateness of the content, the credentials of the sites owner/author/sponsor, and “interactivity.” The overall design or “look” of a page or website is an important part of the review process for including a website in SciLinks. Whether the site is a single page or a connected set of pages, the arrangement of text and graphics will be what compels someone to read the page.
We’ve all seen sites whose design is visually appealing. These sites use spacing to set off the text, making it easier to read. The text is chunked into paragraphs or smaller segments, and the colors of the text and background do not clash. The graphics and animations are of high quality and are integral to the content, not just decorative. Multimedia components such as video clips or podcasts add value to the site. Annoying or distracting sound effects are minimal, and popups and advertising are not included (or are kept to a minimum). A menu, index, or arrows help the user to navigate through the site. Here are several examples of well-designed sites in SciLinks:

• Lionfish Invasion from NOAA has a lot of features, as noted in the menu on the righthand side of the page. This menu stays on the page as you explore the site so that you can always find your way back.
• Most PBS sites, such as The Shape of Life, follow a similar design. Note how this one uses a pictorial index to guide the user. The dark background sets off the photographs. This site can be explored in a variety of ways.
• Geyser Quest is described as an “electronic field trip.” Note how it’s designed to be used with a variety of technological capabilities. The navigation tools are easy to use. My one comment would be that there’s no way to stop the “field trip” and continue at a later time.
• My dad and I used to love to look at maps. A Tapestry of Time and Terrain lets you overlay geology and topography maps. The more you explore, the more information becomes available.

Not everything that is on the World Wide Web is meant for the whole world! Lecture notes, class assignments, and PowerPoint slides are often made available to students in classes. These may or may not be appropriate and useful for the rest of us, especially if they refer to a particular textbook or specific class activities. These often are text-based and generic in design. However, for some topics, especially advanced ones, these class notes or text pages may be the only informational sites available.

The article Using Japanese Lesson Design to ANTicipate an Invasion on Maui caught my attention, not as much because of the topic of fire ants as an introduced species, but for the description of “Lesson Study.” What I found interesting was how this Japanese approach is very different from the way lesson planning is conducted in American schools.
I’ve worked with schools that have “common planning time” in the teachers’ schedules, but in many cases, the “planning” session quickly degenerates into a gripe session or to another individual prep period. I suspect that this is because teaching in American schools is often seen as a solitary profession. There seems to be some sort of unwritten law that we have to do it all ourselves, and that somehow we are “cheating” if we work together or share lessons and other resources. Even when two or more teachers teach the same subjects, there is often little or no consistency in what is taught, in assessments, or in grading systems.
“I’m starting a unit next week on XYZ, and I need some ideas for activities.” This plea is often seen in listserves or teacher bulletin boards. I wonder what it would be like to work with a group of teachers to create, test, and refine curriculum-related lessons. What if these were then published so that others would not have to re-invent the wheel? What if eventually teachers would have their entire course mapped out with tried and true lessons, ready to be used, rather than scrambling on a daily/weekly basis to plan? I realize that for different groups of students, the lessons may have to be modified or extended, but that is certainly better than starting from scratch at the start of each unit.
I’d like to learn more about Lesson Study. I’ve started with a few websites:

• Lesson Study
• Lesson Study Resources
• Tools for Conducting Lesson Study

But I’d like to know more about what this actually looks like in real schools. Japanese Lesson Study, Staff Development, and Science Education Reform describes the efforts of the the Neshaminy School District in Pennsylvania.
Many of the secondary schools I work with are very small, with only 1-2 science teachers in each subject. How would Lesson Study be conducted in these small schools? What kind of professional development (and administrative support) is necessary for Lesson Study to be effective? It would be interesting to hear from other teachers who have been involved in this form of action research/professional development.

Here is an interesting coincidence. The other day, I was reading the Science Teacher article on “The Life and Work of John Snow,” with suggestions for an inquiry-based unit of study that focuses on the history and nature of science. One of the recommended websites, John Snow, is an interesting collection of resources related to his study of cholera during an 19th century epidemic in England. I poked around it for a while, looking at the fascinating period maps and other primary sources. I also logged into SciLinks and did a keyword search on disease for more related information. Later that day, my brother phoned with an invitation to attend a lecture at a local college given by Dr. Rita Colwell, the former director of the National Science Foundation. As we walked into the auditorium we were given a card with the title of her presentation–Global Climate, the Oceans, and Human Health: The Cholera Paradigm. Two references to cholera in the same week! Was this a sign?
Dr. Colwell described the occurrence of cholera in the world, her research on the subject (including how copepods are carriers) and discussed how advances in oceanography, ecology, microbiology, marine biology, epidemiology, medicine, and satellite imagery are being used to create predictive models of potential outbreaks of the disease. She also noted how a low-tech system of filtering water through cloth can reduce the incidence of this disease. If you want to fast-forward your students to a 21st century description of how cholera is being studied, try googling colwell + cholera for information on Dr. Colwell and her team’s studies.
Dr. Colwell concluded her talk summarizing science in the 21st century in two words: international and interdisciplinary. How can we bring these words to life in our classrooms?
This month’s journal has several articles that describe interdisciplinary studies – from inquiry using nematodes, food enzymes, and electrophoresis to a discussion of current taxonomy (astronomers are not the only scientists who reclassify things based on new evidence!).
As I listened to Dr. Colwell’s speech, I kept thinking of the authors’ description of Snow in the journal article–creative, courageous, pursued anomalies, and collaborative–and how this 21st century scientist exhibits these same characteristics as the 19th century one. How do our science classes help students to develop these characteristics?

In the local newspaper, an organization advertised its Haunted House event for Halloween. One of the chambers is the laboratory of a “mad scientist.” I’m sure it was full of the usual stereotypes from horror movies.
Compare these caricatures with the work of real scientists in this month’s Science Scope. (You can access the table of contents by clicking on the picture of the cover.) None of the articles this month has a SciLinks connection code, but you can create your own list by logging into the SciLinks site, and in the Member’s Triad Search, select “History and Nature of Science” and “Science as a Human Endeavor” for a list of interesting websites.
One of my favorites is the website of the Chemical Heritage Foundation. The Classroom Resources section has a section on Chemical Achievers, with biographies arranged by topic. Rather than just a litany of facts, these biographies have graphics, oral histories, and timelines, organized around themes. Some familiar names are here, as well as some that reflect the diversity of those who have made significant contributions. I can spend hours with this site!
Another good resource is Science as a Human Endeavor . This is part of a site created by teachers to showcase websites that relate directly to the National Science Education Standards.
Although the cover of this month’s journal is beautiful, the four scientists (I recognize Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein, but I’m not sure about the fourth one. Any suggestions?) are famous figures from the past. By concentrating on these historical figures, I wonder if we are perpetrating the misconception that science is, as my students might say, “so over.”
How many of our students (and teachers, perhaps) have ever met a real scientist? Museums, government agencies, businesses, and colleges/universities have scientists that can provide our students with real-life examples of what a scientist does. I was involved with a project that brought together two scientists from a natural history museum with local teachers. The herpetologist shared his nationwide research project on frogs and involved the teachers in their own studies of vernal pool amphibians. The entomologist shared her research on endangered species of butterflies and guided the teachers through a study of insect populations in their own schoolyards. It was interesting to watch the interactions between the teachers and these scientists who have a real passion for their work.
In another project, university science professors teamed with K-8 teachers. In addition to conducting hands-on, inquiry-based workshops, the professors visited the teachers’ classrooms on a monthly basis. The students in theses rural schools were astounded to meet real scientists! One child even asked the physics professor if he would autograph his textbook! (I know that writing in textbooks is a no-no, but I would have made an exception in this case.)
A teacher recently asked me for suggestions to replace the library activity in which students prepared “reports” on famous scientists. She wanted students to learn about these scientists, but in the era of electronic encyclopedias and Wikis, having students re-write a list of events and discoveries did not seem like a productive use of students’ time and the school’s technology. We came up with a few ideas (this month’s journal has some great suggestions) for her to try, but perhaps you have some teacher-tested ones already in your lesson plans?
The bottom line here is that the most interesting scientists are not just from the past or the present. Put a mirror on a bulletin board where students can look at scientists of the future!