To help students confront pseudoscientific claims and misinformation in their everyday lives, it is important to develop the epistemic practices of scientists in the classroom. Many of these practices can be illuminated by challenging students to read primary source literature. This article outlines a lesson that has sophomore students reading review and research articles on a pertinent topic. While reading, students think like scientists to extract main ideas, analyze bias, and justify claims with evidence. The papers themselves, as well as the steps employed in the classroom to support students in reading them, highlight the fact that scientists regularly utilize statistics and data, develop a strong theoretical knowledge-base prior to forming conclusions, and seek out critique of their work. Students read these papers collaboratively, working together with one another and with upperclassmen peer mentors to engage in scientific discourse and solidify their understanding of the process of science. This experience challenges students to think as scientists do and provides them with a strong foundation for scientific literacy, preparing them to make more informed decisions about their futures.

This article explores the levels of engagement that students experience during maker-centered instruction, with a particular focus on students in two secondary STEM classrooms. The authors first define key terms related to making and maker-centered instruction, emphasizing the importance of experiential learning and the maker mindset. The authors then describe the lesson context and discuss how engagement was perceived by students. The article draws on three views of engagement: engagement as a partnership with students, engagement as a multidimensional construct, and engagement as a continuum of student actions. We conclude with implications for promoting student investment in learning through explicit attention to engagement in lesson planning and implementation. The authors highlight the importance of maker education in supporting content knowledge and skill-building while also empowering students to invest in their learning. Ultimately, the article emphasizes the potential for maker-centered instruction to promote active and engaged learning for all students while highlighting the need for the support of student engagement through explicit lesson design and student reflection.

This article describes the integrated Coding, Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (CSTEM) full-year course that aligns mathematical skill-building and computational thinking while applying them to real-world problems and the ways in which this applies to teaching scientific literacy. Throughout the curriculum, branded as Learning by Making, students design, construct, analyze and explain their own experiments, acquiring and measuring data that are personally relevant yet also critical to the future of our economy and our planet. In this article, we demonstrate the ways that scientific literacy is incorporated into our curriculum through the development of foundational skills in coding, electronics and experimental design. Supported by the US Department of Education since 2013, the curriculum serves ninth graders in high-need rural High Schools. Teaching these students the foundations of science literacy is important because rural schools often lack the access to technology and are under-resourced. The curriculum focuses on teaching skills over information, as with the increased availability of information due to globalization and the internet, it is more important to teach students how to find information and how to create their own experiments, rather than simply handing them the accumulated knowledge of humanity one step at a time.

The purpose of this article is to describe a lesson aimed at teaching students the function of enzymes in order to obtain mastery of NGSS Standard HS-LS1-2. The lesson is designed to engage learners through the frameworks of the 5E process and sensemaking. To this end, we will describe the lesson features including an “engage” activity, scientific testing, and technology integration activities including a stop motion video simulation. Furthermore, this lesson allows all students to obtain and demonstrate mastery of enzymatic chemical reactions through the intentional pedagogical strategies of multiple representations and expressions.

The Solar Panel Modeling Project challenged 10th-grade chemistry students to apply knowledge of Atomic Models to explain electricity generation in a solar panel, deepening their scientific literacy about climate solutions. Here, I describe the project’s implementation and outcomes, including the solar panel model template, the 9-day learning sequence, and the evolution of student thinking captured in the summarizing whole-class model. Throughout the unit, students alternated between investigating new chemistry concepts and iteratively refining models, exercising their NGSS sense-making skills. Content learning focused primarily on Atomic Models and the Octet Rule, but also included brief introductions to Lattice Stability and the Photoelectric Effect. The real-world context of the project showed students the practical utility of the otherwise esoteric skill of mapping electron locations and movements between elements. By the project’s end, students could verbalize how the specific structure of Silicon, Boron, and Phosphorus in a solar panel results in electron movement and electricity. These students now face the upcoming decades of climate solutions debates armed with deeper scientific literacy about the readiness of this technology for widespread implementation.

Science in the wild — misinformation beyond the boundaries of the science classroom and curated media sources — threatens our culture Here, I present one fun classroom activity, in an engaging game format, that fits in the NGSS framework and can help us build a more media-savvy public.

Many teachers are asked by their students how the science content they are learning in class matters in the "real world." Although these connections may be clear to expert teachers, students often require additional support and scaffolding to see how science relates to their lives and interests. This article will detail how one 9th grade Biology teacher, Mrs. Kalivas used a guiding framework called Democratic Science Teaching to identify sources of disengagement in her class. She then developed a photo journal project that supported her students in building connections between their lives and classroom content. As a result of this work, students reported substantial growth in seeing how science could solve problems in their lives and communities. The article also provides additional considerations for using Democratic Science Teaching in a variety of contexts.

Biological evolutionary models have become popular tools for inquiry. Models can help expose complex systems and guide experimentation. Not all research questions require modelling. However, evolutionary models are helpful at quantitative predictions like determining the mathematical relationships among genotypes and phenotypes. The activities presented in this article allowed students to conceptually explore and apply mathematical models of fitness through a hypothetical activity where black-footed ferrets eat prairie dogs over several generations. In addition, students examined models of butterflies being eaten by a bird, showing directional, stabilizing, and disruptive selection. Finally, students applied a mathematical model created in Excel by entering relative fitness values and interpreting the resulting graphs.

As teachers we commonly learn our subject matter in high school and college. We acquire more knowledge in graduate school and in life experiences. At what stage do we learn how to teach? Answers vary. This article is about how I learned much about teaching by observing the teaching skills, or lack of them, while I was a student—years before I began my teaching career at City College of San Francisco (CCSF) in 1964.

Anaerobic digestion (AD) is a natural process whereby microorganisms break down organic material in the absence of oxygen. Biodigesters (sealed tanks where AD occurs) are complex ecological systems where different microorganisms work together to produce biogas (a mixture of methane and carbon dioxide). They are used to produce energy and fertilizers from organic wastes, such as food waste, crop residues, and animal manure. This article describes the use of a simple model biodigester, built from low-cost materials (water bottles), as a way to introduce students to physical and conceptual models while learning about resource recovery, waste management and sustainability. We piloted our curriculum with pre-service teachers at a [US University], in a middle school [US city] and a high school in [Sub-Saharan African city, country]. Students learned about AD, developed research questions, and built a model biodigester as a tool for scientific inquiry. They collected and analyzed data (e.g., daily biogas and methane production), and they interpreted their results to answer their research questions and make recommendations for local biodigester construction. This article provides an overview of the curriculum and how it can be used in science classrooms to engage students in science and engineering practices.