All Science Scope resources

Journal Article

Teacher’s Toolkit: Promoting and supporting scientific argumentation in the classroom—The evaluate-alternatives instructional model

This article describes an instructional model that science teachers can use to promote and support student engagement in scientific argumentation. This model is called the evaluate-alternatives instructional model and it is grounded in current resear...

Journal Article

Going Bananas Over Fruit: Using Habits of Mind to Foster Nutritional Literacy

Science literacy for all students is an education goal in the United States, as well as in many other parts of the world. Habits of mind are the skills and attitudes that students need to develop in order to understand science as a way of thinking. I...

Journal Article

Teaching Students to Create Undiscovered Ideas

Science curricula often guide us to teach students just the facts, but our students need to be prepared for life in the 21st century. Since technology is developing rapidly, we do not know what new technologies, resources, and information our student...

Journal Article

Embracing Learner’s Ideas About Diffusion and Osmosis: A Coupled-Inquiry Approach

Learning about osmosis and diffusion is often a challenging task for middle school students. Here the authors present a lesson that was converted from a “cookbook” lab (McLaughlin and Thompson 2007) into a more inquiry-oriented lab that uses inqu...

Journal Article

Editor’s Roundtable: Nurturing Scientific Habits of Mind

Science process skills and content knowledge are not enough to produce the scientists and scientifically literate citizens we need in the 21st century....

Journal Article

Science Sampler: How do we know what we know? A look at schemas

A schema is like a file folder in the mind, a knowledge structure that holds all of a learner’s experiences with a given topic. Schemas are thought to be organized, hierarchical representations of information that can help an individual to adapt to...

Journal Article

Tried and True: Looking for Questions

During the first day of school, eighth-grade students often receive hour after hour of specific rules and classroom procedures. However, the author takes a different approach in science class. Here she describes an activity that is designed to engage...

Journal Article

Scope on Safety: Rethinking the Use of Hand Sanitizers

Recent concerns about Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and swine flu have prompted many parents to demand that hand sanitizers be made available in schools to protect their kids. In response, schools began installing alcohol-based h...

Journal Article

Editor’s Roundtable: Classroom management à la Goldilocks

Classroom management is a difficult balancing act. Like Goldilocks, teachers should sample all the classroom management techniques available to them to find the ones that are “just right” for their classroom. Therefore, teachers must quickly esta...