JoinAll The Science Teacher resources
Journal Article
Crystals are beautiful structures—yet they occur naturally in dirty and remote places. In the inquiry-based activity described here, students will enjoy the process of creating their own crystals and using microscopes to examine them. It demonstrat...
Journal Article
Career of the Month: An Interview With Patent Attorney-in-Training Peter Brown
From money-making inventions we think of in the middle of the night to scientific breakthroughs discovered in labs, patents help us protect our original ideas from copycats. With our ideas—legally dubbed intellectual property (IP)—safeguarded, we...
Journal Article
This article presents a model of collaborative inquiry for groups of science teachers who want to systematically improve their practice through analyses of student work. The five-phase APEXST (Advancing High-Leverage Practices by Examining Student Th...
Journal Article
A New Twist on “Mystery Boxes”
In the activity described in this article, students learn about observation, interpretation, and argumentation. Students are led through several stages of observation and inference about an unknown object, during which they learn the value of represe...
Journal Article
Commentary: Seven Steps to Teaching With Inquiry
Science is more than a collection of facts—it is a way of thinking and exploring our world that leads to understanding about what is happening around us. This month’s Commentary presents seven steps that are designed to help science educators use...
Journal Article
Safer Science: Sun Safety—The Stats
Science teachers can help protect themselves and their students by providing information on skin cancer, its causes, and prevention strategies. This is not just a summer issue, but one that affects us year-round! This month’s column provides preven...
Journal Article
Career of the Month: An Interview With Urologist Chad DeRosa
The organs, tubes, muscles, and nerves that work together to create, store, and carry urine make up the urinary system. Urologists are surgeons that focus on diseases of this system—which includes the kidneys, ureters, bladder, supporting muscles a...
Journal Article
Argument-Driven Inquiry (ADI) is an instructional model that enables science teachers to transform a traditional laboratory activity into a short integrated instructional unit. To illustrate how the ADI instructional model works, this article describ...
Journal Article
Many students have recently asked about the “swine flu.” How is it different than the seasonal flu, what are the symptoms, and what can we do to avoid it?...