Tag Archives: inquiry

Diagnosis for Classroom Success: Making Anatomy and Physiology Come Alive

By Carole Hayward | Published: May 28, 2013

I was intrigued with the concept of Diagnosis for Classroom Success as soon as I heard about it. Author Nicole Maller wanted to make the most of her face-to-face time with her students, so she combined elements of storytelling and role-playing to teach her high school students Anatomy and Physiology. Students in her classroom have [...]

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Open-Ended Everyday Science Mysteries

By Carole Hayward | Published: April 26, 2013

This is exciting news! I’ve been a fan of the Everyday Science Mysteries for a long time, but it took time to cull through each volume to get the discipline-specific activities I wanted. In response to teacher demand, NSTA recently published the books for separate content areas: Physical Science, Life Science, and Earth and Space [...]

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Upping the Ante: A Classroom Gas Chromatograph!

By Martin Horejsi | Published: April 19, 2013

The gas chromatograph, until recently, has been a founding member in the exclusive club of scientific instrumentation that lived only in the rarified air of serious scientific laboratories. Other members of the club include the electron microscope, the mass spectrometer, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and of course the cyclotron. Below is a picture of a [...]

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Science for all

By Mary Bigelow | Published: April 7, 2013

Sometimes it seems that some students are excluded from an expectation of success in the sciences – those with cognitive or physical disabilities, those who do not speak English, or those who do not appear to have the intellectual or reading levels that were thought to be important. I often wonder at the thinking and [...]

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Science and students’ interests

By Mary Bigelow | Published: March 16, 2013

Middle school students typically have a lot of energy and enthusiasm. Channeling these into learning opportunities is the challenge for teachers. The Editor’s Roundtable lists key points in designing student-centered, interest-based instruction: get to know your students, use authentic tasks to build conceptual bridges between school and everyday life, design tasks at the right level, [...]

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Russian Meteor Fertile Ground for High Tech Exploration…On Your Classroom Computer

By Martin Horejsi | Published: February 17, 2013

The fall of what is unofficially named the Chelyabinsk Meteor (soon to be meteorite) has produced a staggering number of videos. Whether police dashboard camera, cell phone, ATM camera, traffic camera, parking lot, or just one of hundreds of security cameras, clear video of the event from multiple perspectives, angles, and capture methods has packed YouTube [...]

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Warming Up for a Science Fair

By Carole Hayward | Published: February 6, 2013

Teachers, students, and parents who have participated in a science fair have different perspectives on the experience. Students may feel both excited and nervous as they choose their topics, develop the projects, and present their findings. Parents may remember their dining rooms turning into makeshift laboratories and design studios as crystals form, incline ramps are [...]

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Identifying rocks

By Mary Bigelow | Published: December 28, 2012

I attended an event where we cleaned out the science warehouse for our school system. I got a lot of great stuff for my elementary science classes, including a box of rock and mineral samples that have little stickers with letters or numbers. I’m sure at some point there was a key that told what [...]

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Learning from “mistakes?”

By Mary Bigelow | Published: December 7, 2012

I’d like to try hands-on labs with my fourth graders, but I’m worried they’ll make mistakes. I guess I’m afraid they won’t learn the concepts if they don’t get the right answers. Is there a way to make the activities fool-proof? I’m a first year teacher. —Melissa, Murfreesboro, Tennessee If you scripted the procedures down [...]

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Five things you should put on your iPad Camera

By Martin Horejsi | Published: December 4, 2012

The tablet computer like the iPad can be a magic box of inquiry. For instance, it has a camera, and in particular a front facing camera. Why that is important is because students can manipulate objects on the camera and collectively view the results. And of course you can, with the touch of a finger, [...]

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