Student roles can promote collaboration and individual accountability in groups during engineering design challenges. However, student disengagement may occur if students do not perceive value in their roles. We introduce four distinct roles—quality inspector, market researcher, advertiser, and coordinator. These roles introduce meaningful tasks that contribute to addressing engineering design challenges in group settings and offer differentiated opportunities to address the science and engineering practices. The quality inspector conducts peer reviews of designs from different groups. The market researcher collects and analyzes consumer feedback for product improvement. The advertiser creates engaging illustrations of their work for consumers through media like flyers, reports, or videos. The coordinator organizes, supports, and facilitates their group members and acts as a liaison between teammates and the teacher. The teacher facilitates, supports, models, and guides students in their new responsibilities. Collectively, each student role presents opportunities for meaningful collaboration toward product innovation by emphasizing the importance of each role in achieving the design goal.

Getting ALL students involved in a class can be a difficult task. Getting students EXCITED about reading, writing, and learning can be an even MORE difficult task. Fortunately, the use of Dialogues is an easy strategy that any teacher can implement in any grade and in any subject area to get students up, moving, and actively engaged in the learning process. Dialogues are essentially two-person plays or skits that students act out in pairs. Each dialogue focuses on a specific topic and introduces key vocabulary terms and concepts in a way that students can understand, using day-to-day conversational language. In addition, all students love using Dialogues because they appeal to a wide variety of interests. The "science-y" students love the content, the lit/drama students love the format, and the class comics love the humor! AND they can be personalized and modified to meet the needs of specific students, and educational goals and can be used with other strategies such as exit slips, labs, content review, and more. In short, Dialogues are an easy way to create an inclusive classroom where every student is engaged and successful.

Climate Change

Scope on the Skies column

This manuscript reports on the impact of using collaborative digital summary tables on student engagement and learning. First, traditional summary tables were used during two units in 7th grade life science, then more scaffolded digital collaborative summary tables were used during three additional units. Three-part summative assessment scores were averaged at the end of each unit to analyze the impact on student learning. Compared to traditional summary tables, collaborative digital summary tables increase scaffolding, reflection, and collaboration. This article explains how they function in the classroom to increase learning. The efficacy of collaborative summary tables is shown in improved student scores, especially for students in minority groups. Using summary tables in the classroom has benefits for student engagement and learning, and the achievement gap in the classroom narrows over each unit. The benefits of reflection, scaffolding, and disaggregated instruction in science are also discussed as ways to support student learning and engagement. Overall, collaborative digital summary tables have a powerful impact on student learning and are a useful tool for teachers to increase engagement and academic success in the classroom.

Integrating literacy practices in science classrooms can help students with reading complex scientific text, write arguments as part of shared cross-disciplinary practices and engage with content. In the Linking Science, Mathematics, and Literacy for All Learners program, middle school science, mathematics, ELA, and special education teachers have been implementing multimodal STEM text sets that include a range of texts and scaffolds that support instruction and students’ content learning. One of these strategies combines reading and writing in unique and creative ways: Poetry Writing! Black-out and Found poems are accessible approaches to help students focus on key words and ideas in a complex text, pull out those words to work with them, and then reconstruct them into a poem. This approach can be used in a variety of ways, and in some of the examples provided, students include an altered page from a scientific article on which students find their words, black-out the rest of the text, and then illustrate the entire document to help show their message.

Including SSIs in the classroom can be a daunting task. To make this task more manageable, we have developed a strategy to easily create short modules for use in our classrooms that can be used to introduce new topics or apply previously learned topics. In this article we discuss how to create the modules, ideas for implementation, and lessons learned so far.

In light of the International Panel on Climate Change's findings, this article underscores the detrimental effects of climate misinformation in the U.S. and its role in impeding public understanding and action. Leveraging the power of education, an 8th-grade 5E instructional unit is introduced to foster students' climate literacy by delving into the human-induced causes of climate change. Through the 5E instructional model, students are presented with diverse materials, activities, and projects. These include discussions on climate change activism, interactive simulations, experiments mirroring Eunice Foote's groundbreaking work in 1856, and culminating in a student-produced video project highlighting climate change causes. By melding social perspectives and rigorous scientific exploration, this NGSS-aligned unit draws from relevant climate literacy research and aims to produce a generation of students equipped to actively and knowledgeably participate in global climate discourse.

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Engineering activities often emphasize the practices of engineers, but can sometimes feel disconnected from content. This engineering design activity ties together multiple Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and explicitly addresses the nature of engineering (NOE). We help students connect the activity to authentic engineering through an activity wherein students design a capsule to transport samples from the surface of Mars back to Earth for NASA. Through this process, students define criteria for a successful design by contemplating the role of rovers and then design capsules by drawing on their knowledge of forces, motion, and thermal energy transfer. Finally, students test their designs and evaluate whether they met the criteria they set.

Climate change is a pressing societal challenge. It is also a pedagogical challenge and a worldwide phenomenon, whose local impacts vary across different locations. Climate change reflects global inequity; communities that contribute most to emissions have greater economic resources to shelter from its consequences, while the lowest emitters are most vulnerable. It is scientifically complex, and simultaneously evokes deep emotions. These overlapping issues call for new ways of science teaching that center personal, social, emotional, and historical dimensions of the crisis. In this article, we describe a middle school science curriculum approach that invites students to explore large-scale data sets and author their own data stories about climate change impacts and inequities by blending data and narrative texts. Students learn about climate change in ways that engage their personal and cultural connections to place; engage with complex causal relationships across multiple variables, time, and space; and voice their concerns and hopes for our climate futures. Connections to relevant science, data science, and literacy standards are outlined, along with relevant data sets and assessments.

Open Access article