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Alignment of Instruction with Knowledge of Student Learning
Book Chapter |
A series of classroom vignettes and student conversations provides a glimpse into how our theoretical understanding of human learning translates into science classroom practice. The surprisingly large number of…
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Using the Laboratory to Enhance Student Learning
Book Chapter |
Typical hands-on, cookbook laboratory experiences do an extremely poor job of making apparent and playing off students’ prior ideas, engendering deep reflection, and promoting understanding of complex content. This…
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Using Assessment to Help Students Learn
Book Chapter |
Assessment in the classroom is more than tests and quizzes on Friday. It is an everyday feature of classroom life. Students and teachers use assessment, for example, when they gauge the quality of a response to a…
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Learning About Motion: Fun for All
Book Chapter |
Deborah Roberts is a fifth-grade teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. At the time she wrote this chapter, she was a middle-school science teacher in a high-poverty suburban school in Maryland. An earlier version of this paper…
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A Teacher's Perspective: Learning a Second Language
Book Chapter |
In “Learning a Second Language,” page 107, Ellen Bialystok explains the ways in which reading a science text in a second language makes learning more challenging. She explains that language is the core of science…
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Improving Learning in Science With Formative Assessment
Book Chapter |
In recent years, the No Child Left Behind law has focused attention on student achievement in science across the United States, but there are more important reasons for being concerned with student achievement. The…
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A Perspective on U.S. Science Teaching and Learning
Book Chapter |
This chapter presents a sketch on how PISA 2006 assessed conditions of teaching and learning in science classrooms. With selected findings from PISA 2006, similarities and differences are shown between approaches taken…
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Eleven Assessment Lessons Learned at the Gate
Book Chapter |
As a "gateway" instructor for more than 30 years, the author learned a few things about assessing the "typical" community college student. "Gateway" is the polite euphemism for suggesting you will always be teaching the…
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Analogies: Powerful Teaching-Learning Tools
Book Chapter |
In this activity, teachers explore how teaching shares some attributes with a variety of other occupations, students consider their respective roles as learners, and both consider the reciprocal, interactive nature of…
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Möbius Strip: Connecting Teaching and Learning
Book Chapter |
A Möbius strip is a nonorientable, two-dimensional surface with only one side. The one-sided nature of the Möbius strip is an example of an emergent property—a property that is found in a system as a whole, but not in…
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Electrical Circuits: Promoting Learning Communities
Book Chapter |
Direct current (DC) electricity flows through a closed circuit of people, and a battery-powered ball lights up. In this activity, the Energy Ball (or UFO Ball) is a Ping-Pong ball look-alike battery-powered ball that…
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Eddy Currents: Learning Takes Time
Book Chapter |
A metal slug dropped into a copper tube falls under the pull of gravity and drops out at the bottom fairly quickly. When a second, apparently identical, slug is dropped into the tube, it falls quite slowly. If one slug…
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Tornado in a Bottle: The Vortex of Teaching and Learning
Book Chapter |
In this activity, two 2 L plastic soda bottles are connected at their mouths. Colored water from the upper bottle falls in the lower bottle quickly only after the two bottle system is given a twist to create a spiraling…
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How Mastery Learning Might Look
Book Chapter |
In this chapter, the author describes what their mastery learning classroom looks like and presents several variations that could be used to make mastery learning fit specific circumstances or people.
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Extra! Extra! Learn All About It
Book Chapter |
Communication and reporting of findings to peers are important to middle school students. One way to capitalize on students’ interests and incorporate the nature of science into the science curriculum is to have…
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