Cockroaches, fast food, roadkill, rainfall — the articles in this issue of Science Scope show that middle level science students and teachers can use inquiry skills in studying almost any topic. Collecting, organizing, and analyzing data are important components of inquiry activities and these articles have great teacher-tested examples of how students can organize their [...]
Wow — students doing real research! This adds a different dimension to the “labs” that students do. There is certainly a time and place for replication or follow-the-directions activities (for example, to learn how to use various equipment or to practice skills such as observation and data collection). But the research projects described in this [...]
In the ideal world, every school would have whatever materials it takes to provide quality learning experiences. But our world is not ideal and we teachers have learned to be quite ingenious. Although the activity in the article Discovery Bottles is written for K-2, this could be adapted into a neat idea for the first [...]
At first when I saw this issue, I thought of community partnerships, in which students work with organizations outside of school. But I realized by reading the articles, that the activities and resources also apply to the communities of learners within our own classrooms and to projects that bring people together to learn. The article [...]
In her session on ”Unleashing the Power of Data,” Nancy Love said cultural proficiency—knowing about and understanding different cultures—is key to interpreting data about science learning. “A child is not a number”—this fact is easy to forget when examining data, she observed. Love used this image to illustrate the huge gap that can exist between data on student learning and interpretation of [...]
The articles in this issue focus on one of the fundamental processes of science: observation. How big? What happened? What changed? How does it feel? Students enjoy observing and using tools such as magnifiers, lenses, rulers, and scales. Inferencing, however, is a more complex process, as several articles point out. Log into SciLinks and use [...]
It took me a while to get used to this part of the rubric. When I first became involved with software design back in the 1980s (yes, light years ago!), “interactivity” meant that the user could explore the program (there were no websites then) by clicking on buttons or links and using the program in [...]
