Category: Blog
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is providing an unprecedented amount of health and social science data, and serves as a compelling starting point to engage in data science activities. A new project funded by the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program at the National Science Foundation is designed to empower young people to […]
Cleaning the house while the children are growing is like shoveling the driveway while it’s still snowing. A framed needlepoint of this adage adorned the wall of our kitchen as I was growing up and its message occupied my thoughts as I shoveled our New England driveway for the third time in just over a […]
We live in an interconnected world. A storm hits, the season’s crop is ruined, stocks go higher or lower, and a broker loses a job. A governor’s actions on mask mandates affect travelers in and out of the state, and COVID cases rise across the country. Or as Thich Nhat Hanh says in The Heart […]
Prompted by an editorial in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Absolute certainty is not scientific,” we wrote on this blog, “With the ongoing polarization of science in today’s political environment, it’s more important than ever to remember that science is filled with uncertainty.” That was 2011, and it is still just as true today. At […]
This year we published a dozen articles in researcher and teacher practitioner journals that showcase the state of the field in STEM educational technology in 2020. Learn what students with low and high spatial skills notice in computer visualizations of plate tectonics (#2), how students can experience authentic messy data exploration of meaningful questions (#10), […]
Whether teaching physics, chemistry, or biology, every high school science teacher is challenged to take students on a journey down to the nanoscale level where intangible, invisible forces hold sway and mysteriously result in phenomena at the macroscopic level. Think Ms. Frizzle and her Magic School Bus as her schoolchildren take the ride of their […]
We experience weather every day. And it’s often the easiest icebreaker to start a conversation—“What’s the weather like in your neck of the woods?”—since weather is, well, everywhere! We know a lot about weather, too, thanks to datasets collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The NOAA database includes data from thousands of […]
Remote and hybrid teaching have made keeping track of student work even more challenging. To address this problem, we redesigned our Class Dashboard and have added it to selected activities and modules in our STEM Resource Finder. Just like past iterations, the newly revised Class Dashboard shows a grid of students’ work that updates in […]
Evolution is a particularly daunting subject to teach and to understand. The evidence for it is indirect and the model rests largely on phenomena that cannot be directly observed, including some that are poorly understood to this day. A research-based set of curriculum materials aimed at upper elementary and middle school students can help. We […]
Rebecca Ellis is a research associate at Michigan State University. The Connected Biology project (ConnectedBio), a collaboration between the Concord Consortium and Michigan State University, recently released Deer Mouse Fur Color: From the Field to the Beach. This free, Next Generation Science Standards-aligned set of 15 lessons guides students through a nuanced understanding of the […]