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What better way to engage fifth-grade students in science and engineering practices than to use paper airplanes to encourage them to question, explore, create, and test designs! This multi-day unit [...]

What's more engaging than paper airplanes? The title of our investigation alone gets my students excited! This engineering design challenge (two 90-minute lessons) introduces fifth graders to the process of [...]

Byline: Valerie Raunig Finnerty Photos courtesy of the author By the end of the eighth grade, students are expected to have a basic understanding of the mechanisms of basic genetic [...]

Here are some of the themes for the upcoming publishing year of Science Scope. Visit http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nsta to register as an author and submit your article. March/April 2023: PS2: Matter and [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

Online software systems are extensively used to give students practice on course content, especially in mathematics and physics courses. They offer instant feedback, and several of these systems are open source or very economical compared with hiring graders for traditional paper-and-pencil-based homework (PPH). In this article, the authors evaluate WeBWorK (WW), an online software tool, in an introductory course on probability over two semesters. WW is compared with PPH by measuring student perception, average time spent on a problem, collaborative work outside of classroom, resilience, self-efficacy, and exam performance. The authors find that except for working in groups on homework, students perform similarly on all the aforementioned aspects in both PPH and WW. The authors also suggest potential strategies to improve student understanding and learning while using WW and recommend the use of WW in mathematics-oriented courses., Homework assignments are a critical component of college education, especially in mathematics-oriented courses. Homework assignments can serve multiple instructional purposes, which are reviewed in detail by Bas, Senturk, and Mehmet [...]

Learning about chromosomes is standard fare in biology classrooms today. However, students may find it difficult to understand the relationships among the genome, chromosomes, genes, a gene locus, and alleles. [...]

Here are some of the themes for the upcoming publishing year of Science Scope. Visit http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nsta to register as an author and submit your article. September/October 2023: Cultivating Collaboration Submission [...]

Each team in our class has twenty minutes to make a paper plane that can fly the farthest. One sheet of paper per plane. No other stuff. Five pieces of [...]

Here are some of the themes for the upcoming publishing year of Science Scope. Visit http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nsta to register as an author and submit your article. July/August 2023: Eclipses Across America [...]

Here are some of the themes for the upcoming publishing year of Science Scope. Visit http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nsta to register as an author and submit your article. May/June 2023: Using Coding and [...]

Byline: James Minogue and Todd Guentensberger In working with a group of undergraduate education majors during a science teaching methods course, I asked a seemingly simple question: What do you [...]

If we gave you a grocery store receipt and asked if there was anything unique about the printing on the paper, what would you say? We developed an activity that [...]

We are seeking submissions that present classroom-tested, novel, and engaging lessons for preK-5 students. They should include all of the components necessary for an engineering investigation to be completed and [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

1. Make tape 'ears' on the ends of a clothespin. Wiggle large pinholes in the middle of each. 2. Clamp upright to the raised pulltab on a soda can. 3. [...]

The crowd erupted into a roar as the paper airplane's journey came to an end. '773 cm!' A student shouted as her group recorded the data. As other students jotted [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

It is well-known that too many students learn to 'plug and chug' formulas while gaining very little concomitant understanding of the underlying concepts. Active engagement in the classroom is one [...]

This article presents the combination of three enhanced educational approaches for training future scientists. These methods incorporate skills generally not introduced in the freshman year: student-led blackboard introductions; the writing of scientific papers; and the design, execution, and presentation of an independent lab module. We tested these methods in an interdisciplinary science laboratory course at Princeton University and summarize 2 years of qualitative and quantitative data on the basis of students' evaluations of our approach. In addition to details on our implementation, we show that students mastered all of the requirements and embraced our expectations for greater creativity, independent thinking, and problem solving. The integration of these teaching methods early in their education can help them develop into more successful scientists, and the methods can be broadly applied across the natural sciences. Resources for implementation of our methods are provided., Undergraduate freshmen can often be described as young, inexperienced, and impressionable, and it is exactly this fresh perspective that makes their education so important, especially when considering advanced courses designed [...]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Learning about chromosomes is standard fare in biology classrooms today. However, students may find it difficult to understand the relationships among the genome, chromosomes, genes, a gene locus, [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

1. Make a chain of paper clips to swing like a pendulum. This scientist is finding the frequency of a 5-clip chain How many CYCLES in aminute? LENGTH: the number [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

Recently, many students experienced a sudden shift to virtual learning. During this abrupt transition, I helped my students adapt to online learning by employing user-friendly tools to best support students' [...]

The incorporation of scientific inquiry into college classrooms has steadily risen as faculty work to move away from exclusively didactic methods. One type of inquiry structure, the design task, produces a product rather than simply a conclusion. This offers students a context to apply their understanding of content in a tangible way that has particular appeal for the nontraditional student. This paper describes two examples of how a common, underlying design task--designing a paper airplane--was modified to meet the needs of two very different college science courses. Each had distinct curricular goals and populations of science students: a teacher education course for K-8 inservice teachers and a physics content course for nontraditional college students. The differences resulted in different pedagogical choices in the details of the activity. These cases serve to illustrate both important considerations in the design of this type of inquiry activity--design challenges--and how such activities can be used to meet differing educational goals., The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how the details of a design challenge can be adjusted to match the pedagogical needs of a particular course. We share two [...]

Chimpanzees of all ages and all sexes can learn, as well as a young child, the simple circular relationship between the three different hand signals used in the well-known game [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

The Science Teacher (TST) seeks manuscripts of approximately 2,000-2,500 words that describe new and creative ideas for the secondary science classroom. Manuscripts should provide practical activities related to the themes [...]

We are seeking submissions that present classroom-tested, novel, and engaging lessons for preK-5 students. They should include all of the components necessary for an engineering investigation to be completed and [...]

Habits of inquiry should be nurtured as early as possible. Elementary students must be challenged to ask good questions and develop inquiring attitudes that prepare them for middle and high [...]

1. Make tape 'ears' on the ends of a clothespin. Wiggle large pinholes in the middle of each. 2. Clamp upright to the raised pull-tab on a soda can. 3. [...]

Computer-delivered exams are attractive due to ease of delivery, lack of waste, and immediate results. But before moving to computer-based assessments, instructors should consider whether they affect student performance and the student exam experience, particularly for underrepresented student groups and students with exam anxiety. In this study, we gave students in an introductory biology class alternating computer and paper examinations and compared their performance and exam anxiety. On average, students did not perform differently on the two exam types. Additionally, the performance of different subgroups (e.g., non-native English speakers, White students, non-White students, first-generation college students, male and female students, and students who have exam anxiety) was not affected by exam type. Students overall and in different subgroups reported nearly identical amounts of test anxiety during paper and electronic exams. The average time to complete the exam was shorter for computer exams. Students were relatively evenly split as to expressed exam-type preference and did not indicate that one format facilitated cheating more than the other Based on these results, we believe computer-based exams can be an efficient and equitable approach to assessment., Computer-based exams offer advantages over paper-based exams, including grading of certain question types automatically (e.g., multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, matching), providing immediate feedback on exam performance, generating multiple versions of exams [...]

We are seeking submissions that present classroom-tested, novel, and engaging lessons for preK-5 students. They should include all of the components necessary for an engineering investigation to be completed and [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

Your 2,000-word manuscript should describe a set of connected lessons or investigations that build an idea or content area. They should include assessments (pre-, post- and formative) as well as [...]

The Science Teacher (TST) seeks manuscripts of approximately 2,000--2,500 words that describe new and creative ideas for the secondary science classroom. Manuscripts should provide practical activities related to the themes [...]

The Science Teacher (TST) seeks manuscripts of approximately 2,000-2,500 words that describe new and creative ideas for the secondary science classroom. Manuscripts should provide practical activities related to the themes [...]

From water marks to colored threads, governments are constantly adding new features to paper money to stay one step ahead of counterfeiters. Now, a longhorn beetle has inspired yet another [...]

We are seeking submissions that present classroom-tested, novel, and engaging lessons for preK-5 students. They should include all of the components necessary for an engineering investigation to be completed and [...]

The Science Teacher (TST) seeks manuscripts of approximately 2,000-2,500 words that describe new and creative ideas for the secondary science classroom. Manuscripts should provide practical activities related to the themes [...]

We are seeking submissions that present classroom-tested, novel, and engaging lessons for preK--5 students. They should include all of the components necessary for an engineering investigation to be completed and [...]

We are seeking submissions that present classroom-tested, novel, and engaging lessons for preK-5 students. They should include all of the components necessary for an engineering investigation to be completed and [...]

... adapted from Rocks & Minerals #23 by TOPS Learning Systems 1. Mix a level tablespoon of Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) with 2 tablespoons water on a plate. 2. Fold [...]

We are seeking submissions that present classroom-tested, novel, and engaging lessons for preK-5 students. They should include all of the components necessary for an engineering investigation to be completed and [...]