A brief overview of teacher tools that promote student discourse in the classroom. A summary of why spend your time on talk in the science classroom and its functions.
Every Learning Experience in Foundation Science Begins with a brainstorming activity. This six minute video explains how brainstorming can be used to determine prior knowledge of your students, introduce new content, and establish a safe classroom culture for sharing ideas.
In this short text, the power of formative assessment as a teaching tool is detailed, and examples of opportunities for formative assessment within Foundation Science Biology proposed, for Learning Experiences (LE) 2, 3 and 4.
The “Science Literacy Through Science Journalism” (SciJourn) project explores how the practices of good science journalism can inform high school science education. As high school students report science news, they learn to gather and contextualize information and bring critical eyes to that which they read and write. This effort can be contrasted to the goal of making every student a “little scientist.”
In this study, we examine how a professional science news editor and high school teachers respond to student writing in order to understand the values and priorities each bring to bear on student work. These questions guided our work:
• How do teachers respond to authentic genres in content-area classes?
• How does teacher response compare to the responses of a professional editor?
A demonstration of the SmartGraphs software, and features of the authoring system, is available here: Authoring Demo. Concord is also making the authoring system available to any NSF-funded project that wants to incorporate Web-based SmartGraphs activities into its work. Activities run directly in a browser, so there is nothing to download or install. See http://smartgraphs.org for details about SmartGraphs.
SmartGraphs is free, open source software that helps students understand graphs and concepts represented in graphs (e.g., slope, velocity, half-life, global warming).
“The U.S. Preventative Services Task Force issued new guidelines for mammograms in 2009. What does this mean for someone with a family history of breast cancer? Congress periodically votes on a piece of legislation called the Farm Bill. What does its current iteration mean for the safety of supermarket eggs? Understanding how the latest science affects real people—patients, consumers, voters, and taxpayers—is at the heart of science literacy.”
—From Chapter 1 of Front-Page Science
Like citizen journalists, your students can get to the heart of science literacy—and challenging questions like these—with the “learn by doing” methodology in this innovative book. Front-Page Science uses science journalism techniques to help students become better consumers of, and contributors to, a scientifically literate community.
This article describes The Concord Consortium's High-Adventure Science Project, which brings frontier science into the classroom, allowing students to explore questions in Earth and space science that scientists are currently investigating.
Science education reforms, such as the introduction of inquiry into the classroom, represent second order educational changes (12,13). Although first order changes require small alterations of existing practices, second order changes challenge the structures and rules of schooling. Research on second order change has shown that, despite best efforts, most reforms are “either adapted to fit what existed or sloughed off, allowing the system to remain essentially untouched” (12, p. 343). RET’s seem to hold the most promise for supporting second order changes as represented by inquiry; however, given the difficulty in achieving and sustaining second order changes, the need for research into their influence is clear. This research project will focus on analyzing RET programs through description of their essential features, their efficacy in fostering teachers’ understanding and enactment of inquiry, their interaction with the personal characteristics of participating teachers, and an examination of the influence of teaching through inquiry on student learning in science.
Many of us learned about dominant and recessive genes in a humdrum high school biology class. Some of us may still recognize the terms and symbols twenty or thirty years later—are your eyes bb or Bb? But, as it turns out, a very small number of traits in humans and other animals, plants, amoeba … you name it … involve the dominance mechanism of a single gene with just two alleles. (An allele is a variation of a gene, like the B or b in the above example.) The more biologists discover about the mechanisms of inheritance, the fewer traits we can point to that involve only one gene or can be illustrated using a simple Punnett square. In fact, biologists are compiling information about our genes at an astounding rate. As the process of sequencing DNA improves, the science of biology is dramatically changing.
