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Journal Article
The Hudson River Watershed contains a variety of geologic, topographic, climatic, and hydrologic features and a diversity of land-use patterns—making it an ideal model for studying human impact on the coastal environment. In this article, the autho...
Journal Article
Science 2.0: Invitation to Inquiry
Too often, students are not engaged in authentic questioning. Dan Meyer, a math educator, explains, “Our curricula are full of pseudoproblems wrapped in pseudocontext. We ask students to grapple with problems that only sort of resemble the real wor...
Journal Article
Why Do Athletes Drink Sports Drinks?
Why does an athlete reach for a sports drink after a tough game or practice? The learning cycle presented in this article helps students answer this question. Learning cycles (Marek 2009) are designed to guide students through direct experiences with...
Journal Article
Thoughtful teachers allow students to pursue the relationship between structure and function before learning about particular organelles, usually through an analogy to a factory or some other complex system (Crooks and Sheldon 2005). In this Idea Ban...
Journal Article
Career of the Month: An Interview With Broadcast Engineer Glenn Leffler
Broadcast engineers maintain radio stations—their job is to keep stations on the air and making money. From rewiring a station’s equipment to fixing a transmitter on a mountaintop at 3:00 a.m., these engineers make sure that we, the listeners, ca...
Journal Article
The Green Room: Greening Your Science Curriculum
You do not need to significantly change your curriculum to incorporate environmental topics. There are plenty of course-specific resources that can help you green your individual course content; or, if your whole science department is “on board,”...
Journal Article
Editor’s Corner: Into the Future With <em>The Science Teacher</em>
The end of the year is always a time for reflection. Although December may feel more like midyear for teachers, the end of the calendar year inevitably brings top 10 lists, reviews of the year’s best, and personal vows for improvement. But before y...
Journal Article
The New Teacher’s Toolbox: Getting a Handle on Grading
Anecdotally, colleagues have shared that they spend anywhere from 3 to 10 hours a week on grading—depending on the time of year. When you add planning time to that, it’s easy to see how evenings and weekends can be quickly eaten up by paperwork. ...
Journal Article
The New Teacher’s Toolbox: When Silence Is Not Golden
Silences can be quite uncomfortable, and in front of a classroom of students, 10 seconds can feel like an eternity. Class participation is tricky because it depends on several complicated dynamics. Ideally, many students will consistently volunteer i...
Journal Article
Many first-year chemistry students have memorized the steps of the “scientific method” and can recite them without any prompting. But when introduced to controlled, independent, and dependent variables, they hit a brick wall. Therefore, the autho...