Engage your students with inquiry-based lessons that help them think like scientists! "[This] book...has made such a difference in my teaching of science this school year. I have had some of the most amazing science lessons and activities with my students and I attribute this to what I learned from...[this] book... I have watched my 5th grade students go from being casual observers in science to making some amazing observations that I even missed. We enjoy our class investigations and the students ask for more!" --Alyce F. Surmann, Sembach Middle School "Teachers will relate well to the author's personal stories and specific examples given in the text, especially the ones about events in his own classroom.... like having the grasshoppers escape into the classroom!" --Andrea S. Martine, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, Warrior Run School District With Teaching the Nature of Science through Process Skills, author and science educator Randy Bell uses process skills you'll recognize, such as inference and observation, to promote an understanding of the characteristics of science knowledge. His personal stories, taken from years of teaching, set the stage for a friendly narrative that illuminates these characteristics of scientific knowledge and provides step-by-step guidance for implementing inquiry activities that help children understand such important, yet abstract, concepts. With Randy as your guide, you can better adhere to current science education standards that urge teachers to go beyond teaching science content to teach children about the practice and the nature of science in a way that engages all learners in grades three through eight. Investigate further... More than 50 ideas and activities for teaching the nature of science to help you meet content standards. A comprehensive framework to guide you in integrating the approach across the science curriculum, throughout the school year, and across the grade levels. A goldmine of reproducible resources, such as work sheets, notebook assignments, and more. Assessment guidance that helps you measure your students' nature of science understanding.

Humans, especially children, are naturally curious. Yet, people often balk at the thought of learning scienceâ€"the "eyes glazed over" syndrome. Teachers may find teaching science a major challenge in an era when science ranges from the hardly imaginable quark to the distant, blazing quasar. Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards is the book that educators have been waiting forâ€"a practical guide to teaching inquiry and teaching through inquiry, as recommended by the National Science Education Standards. This will be an important resource for educators who must help school boards, parents, and teachers understand "why we can't teach the way we used to." "Inquiry" refers to the diverse ways in which scientists study the natural world and in which students grasp science knowledge and the methods by which that knowledge is produced. This book explains and illustrates how inquiry helps students learn science content, master how to do science, and understand the nature of science. This book explores the dimensions of teaching and learning science as inquiry for K-12 students across a range of science topics. Detailed examples help clarify when teachers should use the inquiry-based approach and how much structure, guidance, and coaching they should provide. The book dispels myths that may have discouraged educators from the inquiry-based approach and illuminates the subtle interplay between concepts, processes, and science as it is experienced in the classroom. Inquiry and the National Science Education Standards shows how to bring the standards to life, with features such as classroom vignettes exploring different kinds of inquiries for elementary, middle, and high school and Frequently Asked Questions for teachers, responding to common concerns such as obtaining teaching supplies. Turning to assessment, the committee discusses why assessment is important, looks at existing schemes and formats, and addresses how to involve students in assessing their own learning achievements. In addition, this book discusses administrative assistance, communication with parents, appropriate teacher evaluation, and other avenues to promoting and supporting this new teaching paradigm.

Seasoned classroom veterans, pre-tenured faculty, and neophyte teaching assistants alike will find this book invaluable. HHMI Professor Jo Handelsman and her colleagues at the Wisconsin Program for Scientific Teaching (WPST) have distilled key findings from education, learning, and cognitive psychology and translated them into six chapters of digestible research points and practical classroom examples. The recommendations have been tried and tested in the National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology and through the WPST. Scientific Teaching is not a prescription for better teaching. Rather, it encourages the reader to approach teaching in a way that captures the spirit and rigor of scientific research and to contribute to transforming how students learn science.

This book consolidates contemporary thinking and research efforts in teaching and learning about the nature of science in science education. The term ‘Nature of Science’ (NoS) has appeared in the science education literature for many decades. While there is still a controversy among science educators about what constitutes NoS, educators are unanimous in acknowledging the importance of this topic as well as the need to make it explicit in teaching science. The general consensus is that the nature of science is an intricate and multifaceted theme that requires continued scholarship. Recent analysis of research trends in science education indicates that investigation of the nature of science continues to be one of the most prevalent topics in academic publications. Advances in Nature of Science Research explores teaching and assessing the nature of science as a means of addressing and solving problems in conceptual change, developing positive attitudes toward science, promoting thinking habits, advancing inquiry skills and preparing citizens literate in science and technology. The book brings together prominent scholars in the field to share their cutting-edge knowledge about the place of the nature of science in science teaching and learning contexts. The chapters explore theoretical frameworks, new directions and changing practices from intervention studies, discourse analyses, classroom-based investigations, anthropological observations, and design-based research.

This book synthesizes current literature and research on scientific inquiry and the nature of science in K-12 instruction. Its presentation of the distinctions and overlaps of inquiry and nature of science as instructional outcomes are unique in contemporary literature. Researchers and teachers will find the text interesting as it carefully explores the subtleties and challenges of designing curriculum and instruction for integrating inquiry and nature of science.

This is the first book to blend a justification for the inclusion of the history and philosophy of science in science teaching with methods by which this vital content can be shared with a variety of learners. It contains a complete analysis of the variety of tools developed thus far to assess learning in this domain. This book is relevant to science methods instructors, science education graduate students and science teachers.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to Nature of Science (NOS), one of the most important aspects of science teaching and learning, and includes tested strategies for teaching aspects of the NOS in a variety of instructional settings. In line with the recommendations in the field to include NOS in all plans for science instruction, the book provides an accessible resource of background information on NOS, rationales for teaching these targeted NOS aspects, and – most importantly – how to teach about the nature of science in specific instructional contexts. The first section examines the why and what of NOS, its nature, and what research says about how to teach NOS in science settings. The second section focuses on extending knowledge about NOS to question of scientific method, theory-laden observation, the role of experiments and observations and distinctions between science, engineering and technology. The dominant theme of the remainder of the book is a focus on teaching aspects of NOS applicable to a wide variety of instructional environments.

How do you get a fourth-grader excited about history? How do you even begin to persuade high school students that mathematical functions are relevant to their everyday lives? In this volume, practical questions that confront every classroom teacher are addressed using the latest exciting research on cognition, teaching, and learning. How Students Learn: History, Mathematics, and Science in the Classroom builds on the discoveries detailed in the bestselling How People Learn. Now, these findings are presented in a way that teachers can use immediately, to revitalize their work in the classroom for even greater effectiveness. Organized for utility, the book explores how the principles of learning can be applied in teaching history, science, and math topics at three levels: elementary, middle, and high school. Leading educators explain in detail how they developed successful curricula and teaching approaches, presenting strategies that serve as models for curriculum development and classroom instruction. Their recounting of personal teaching experiences lends strength and warmth to this volume. The book explores the importance of balancing students' knowledge of historical fact against their understanding of concepts, such as change and cause, and their skills in assessing historical accounts. It discusses how to build straightforward science experiments into true understanding of scientific principles. And it shows how to overcome the difficulties in teaching math to generate real insight and reasoning in math students. It also features illustrated suggestions for classroom activities. How Students Learn offers a highly useful blend of principle and practice. It will be important not only to teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, and teacher educators, but also to parents and the larger community concerned about children's education.

What is science for a child? How do children learn about science and how to do science? Drawing on a vast array of work from neuroscience to classroom observation, Taking Science to School provides a comprehensive picture of what we know about teaching and learning science from kindergarten through eighth grade. By looking at a broad range of questions, this book provides a basic foundation for guiding science teaching and supporting students in their learning. Taking Science to School answers such questions as: When do children begin to learn about science? Are there critical stages in a child's development of such scientific concepts as mass or animate objects? What role does nonschool learning play in children's knowledge of science? How can science education capitalize on children's natural curiosity? What are the best tasks for books, lectures, and hands-on learning? How can teachers be taught to teach science? The book also provides a detailed examination of how we know what we know about children's learning of scienceâ€"about the role of research and evidence. This book will be an essential resource for everyone involved in K-8 science educationâ€"teachers, principals, boards of education, teacher education providers and accreditors, education researchers, federal education agencies, and state and federal policy makers. It will also be a useful guide for parents and others interested in how children learn.