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Thinking like a scientist

Nearly every day, newspapers report on new scientific breakthroughs.  Scientists provide measures of their uncertainty in the results, expressed as a p-value. The p-value is a statistical measure of the randomness of the results; a lower p-value indicates that the reported result is not likely due to chance.  In scientific studies, a p-value of 0.05 […]

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See You at NARST

Amy Pallant discusses the role of uncertainty in student scientific argumentation at the National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST). Based on the High-Adventure Science project, which engages students in unanswered questions in science, she presents “Characterizing Uncertainty Associated with Middle School Students’ Scientific Arguments“ on Sunday, April 3, at 2:45 p.m. 

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How not to Learn from Games

They’re the in thing, especially for teaching science. Everyone, it seems, is fascinated by the potential of educational games. They’re interactive and “multimedia,” they can adapt to individual students, they promote “authentic learning.” In short, they match the outsize expectations of a digital world. They’re definitely cool, but do they teach, and if so, what […]

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iPad2 HTML5 stats look good

Sencha has the latest on the new iPad’s HTML5 performance, and the verdict looks quite good: The iPad 2’s Mobile Safari browser is the best implementation of WebKit on a mobile device. In our testing we tried to throw everything we could at the browser and it had no issues keeping up with the most […]

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Tools to Foster Critical Thinking and Argumentation

Amy Pallant, Sarah Pryputniewicz, and Hee-Sun Lee describe the High-Adventure Science investigations in the March issue of The Science Teacher. The investigations stimulate students to think critically in order to explore the evidence and discuss the issues of certainty with the models and data. High-Adventure Science has obtained impressive learning results where students showed significant improvement in their understanding of science content and argumentation skills.

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