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Journal Article
The Moon can only be seen at night, electricity only comes from batteries, and dinosaurs and cavemen lived at the same time—these are just a few of the misconceptions students have about science (Phillips 1991). Though instructional labs, demonstra...
Journal Article
Active Learning Strategies: The Top 10
Conceptual change instruction recognizes that students bring personal, or naive, conceptions to the classroom, which they use to explain their world, interpret situations, and create meaning (Driver et al. 2007). But what happens when students' perso...
Journal Article
Get in the Game With Team Density
A floating bowling ball? No way! There is no better way to get students' attention and reinforce the need for conceptual understanding than with a discrepant event like this. Density is a central concept in chemistry and physical science from middle ...
Journal Article
The New Teacher's Toolbox: Piloting New Ideas—The Brown-Bag Friday Seminar
One of the most exciting things about beginning a teaching career is developing your own ideas. Piloting new lessons is key to establishing a solid curriculum—though the process is often time-consuming and requires much reflection. In this month's ...
Journal Article
Editor's Corner: Private Worlds
Every time we teach, new concepts compete with students' misconceptions. It is only by identifying and examining these naive ideas that we can hope to bring about conceptual change. In this month's Editor's Corner, Field Editor Steve Metz advocates f...
Journal Article
Safer Science: Live Animals and Dissection
Responsible Use of Live Animals and Dissection in the Science Classroom, one of NSTA's position statements, emphasizes the role of student interaction with animals in the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996). It encourages educators and sc...
Journal Article
Are plastic water bottles safe to drink from and reuse repeatedly?...
Journal Article
Career of the Month: An Interview With Scientific Photographer Flip Nicklin
Scientific photographers use special photo imaging techniques to record experiments, illustrate information, and capture both the hidden and visible world around us. This Career of the Month column features an interview with underwater photographer F...
Journal Article
Fire and Ecological Disturbance
Misconceptions are not simply factual errors or a lack of understanding, but rather explanations that are constructed based on past experiences (Hewson and Hewson 1988). If students' misconceptions are not directly engaged in the learning process, th...
Journal Article
Science 2.0: Stop-Motion Mitosis
In this month's Science 2.0 column, Eric Brunsell and Martin Horejsi share an interview with Kathy Cady, a biology teacher in Winneconne, Wisconsin, who uses stop-still animation to engage her students. Stop-still, or stop-motion, animations feature ...
Journal Article
The Green Room: School Gardens
A School Garden fits nicely within the guiding principles for sustainable schooling. As the sustainability coordinator at St. Stephen's and St. Agnes School, this column author's most fulfilling, inclusive, well-received, and challenging project was ...