Science

No one curriculum can meet the needs of all students and teachers. This video describes why a teacher might want to modify a curriculum and how he or she would go about it.

An effective curriculum helps you support students' science learning, understanding, and achievement. But what does "effective" mean? This video gives you the inside scoop on what makes a curriculum effective and flags some common pitfalls to avoid.

New technologies are increasingly giving science teachers the ability to access and customize science lessons. However, there is substantial debate in the literature about whether and under what conditions teacher customization benefit student learning. In this study, we examined teacher customization of inquiry-based science lessons from an online lesson portal. We found that students who completed teacher-customized lessons had greater improvements in science content understanding than students who completed non-customized lessons.

The Innovative Technology in Science Inquiry (ITSI) project is a learning portal with hundreds of free, customizable science, math,

Lynch, S.J. (2015, Aug. 1). Science for All: A new breed of schools is closing achievement gaps among students and may hold the key to a revitalized 21st-century workforce. Scientific American. Retrieved from: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/science-for-all/

The recent revisions to the advanced placement (AP) chemistry curriculum promote deep conceptual understanding of chemistry content over more rote memorization of facts and algorithmic problem solving. For many teachers, this will mean moving away from traditional worksheets and verification lab activities that they have used to address the vast amounts of content in the AP chemistry course. Moreover, a substantial shift in teachers’ beliefs about teaching and learning of chemistry will be needed to facilitate the transformation of their instructional practices.

There is the tendency to explain away successful urban schools as indicative of the heroic efforts by a tireless individual, effectively blaming schools that underperform for a lack of grit and dedication. This study reports the development of a research instrument (School Science Infrastructure, or SSI) and then applying that tool to an investigation of equitable science performance by elementary schools.