All Science Scope resources

Journal Article

Scope on Safety: Digging up the dirt on soil safety

Should middle school science teachers be concerned about students bringing in unknown sources of soil to work on in class as the activity suggests? Th...

Journal Article

Scope on the Skies: End of the line for a star like ours

Stars of different masses have varying life spans, with the more massive stars “burning out” more quickly than stars of lower masses. How or what ...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Visual formative assessments—The use of images to quickly assess and record student learning

Visual formative assessments (VFAs) allow more free more time for direct instruction. VFA’s guide students in using simple images to demonstrate the...

Journal Article

Tried and True: The view at the zoo—Using a photographic scavenger hunt as the basis for an interdisciplinary field trip

Most educators have a love-hate relationship with field trips. On the one hand, field trips are a great way to get students out of the building, enhan...

Journal Article

Getting Students to be Successful, Independent Investigators

Middle school students often struggle when writing testable problems, planning valid and reliable procedures, and drawing meaningful evidence-based co...

Journal Article

Editor’s Roundtable: A world of data to explore

Middle-level students can analyze existing data as well as collect it firsthand so that they can better understand natural phenomena and the methods w...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: SSSNOW Project—Helping make science cool for students

In the atmosphere or on the ground, snow provides students with unique opportunities to discover winter weather patterns. Traditionally, when students...

Journal Article

Tech Trek: Cell phones for science

Although in some schools cell phones have to be turned off or perhaps kept in lockers to avoid misuse, the authors hope to demonstrate in this article...

Journal Article

Science Sampler: Is knowledge random? Introducing sampling and bias through outdoor inquiry

Sampling, very generally, is the process of learning about something by selecting and assessing representative parts of that population or object. In ...

Journal Article

How Middle School Students Come Face to Face With Down Syndrome Research

This article discusses how real research on Down syndrome, being done in a lab at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), was incor...

Journal Article

Scope on Safety: Common sense and chemicals

This month’s column features two true stories about the use of chemicals in the middle school science classroom. The lesson of these stories is simp...

Journal Article

Predicting The Timing And Location of the Next Hawaiian Volcano

The wealth of geologic data on Hawaiian volcanoes makes them ideal for study by middle school students. In this paper the authors use existing data on...