"This book contains a collection of astronomy assignments like no other book available. The lessons in Engaging in Astronomical Inquiry reflect an innovative approach to learning astronomy by putting you, the learner, in the center of each and every lesson. In these lessons, you decide what specific topics you want to study, create your own research questions, design your own strategies to pursue the evidence, and defend your scientific conclusions based on the data you collect. If this sounds like you are responsible for your own learning in these lessons, you are exactly right. In Engaging in Astronomical Inquiry, you are the astronomer out there collecting data about objects in the cosmos."--Preface.
Tim Slater and Roger Freedman have worked to improve astronomy and overall science education for many years. Now, they’ve partnered to create a new textbook, a re-envisioning of the course, focused on conceptual understanding and inquiry-based learning. Investigating Astronomy: A Conceptual Approach to the Universe is a brief, 15-chapter text that employs a variety of activities and experiences to encourage students to think like a scientist.
Modern science teaching challenges students to engage in scientific research and participate in scientific discourse - in short, to do science themselves rather than just learn about it. Recent learning sciences research results demonstrate that in order for novice science students to effectively design, conduct, report, and defend science observations and experiments, learners must be purposefully supported in each step of the scientific process before they are able to successfully pursue scientific questions of their own design. Using a backwards faded scaffolding approach, these labs provide classroom-ready materials for bringing these two ideas together: scaffolding strategies that teach students to fruitfully engage in scientific thinking and design astronomy investigations by mining online astronomy databases, including GalaxyZoo access to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and NASA Solar System Simulators.
In preparing the report, Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millenium , the AASC made use of a series of panel reports that address various aspects of ground- and space-based astronomy and astrophysics. These reports provide in-depth technical detail. Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millenium: An Overview summarizes the science goals and recommended initiatives in a short, richly illustrated, non-technical booklet.
What types of instructional experiences help K-8 students learn science with understanding? What do science educators, teachers, teacher leaders, science specialists, professional development staff, curriculum designers, and school administrators need to know to create and support such experiences? Ready, Set, Science! guides the way with an account of the groundbreaking and comprehensive synthesis of research into teaching and learning science in kindergarten through eighth grade. Based on the recently released National Research Council report Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8, this book summarizes a rich body of findings from the learning sciences and builds detailed cases of science educators at work to make the implications of research clear, accessible, and stimulating for a broad range of science educators. Ready, Set, Science! is filled with classroom case studies that bring to life the research findings and help readers to replicate success. Most of these stories are based on real classroom experiences that illustrate the complexities that teachers grapple with every day. They show how teachers work to select and design rigorous and engaging instructional tasks, manage classrooms, orchestrate productive discussions with culturally and linguistically diverse groups of students, and help students make their thinking visible using a variety of representational tools. This book will be an essential resource for science education practitioners and contains information that will be extremely useful to everyone �including parents �directly or indirectly involved in the teaching of science.
The National Science Foundation funded a synthesis study on the status, contributions, and future direction of discipline-based education research (DBER) in physics, biological sciences, geosciences, and chemistry. DBER combines knowledge of teaching and learning with deep knowledge of discipline-specific science content. It describes the discipline-specific difficulties learners face and the specialized intellectual and instructional resources that can facilitate student understanding. Discipline-Based Education Research is based on a 30-month study built on two workshops held in 2008 to explore evidence on promising practices in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. This book asks questions that are essential to advancing DBER and broadening its impact on undergraduate science teaching and learning. The book provides empirical research on undergraduate teaching and learning in the sciences, explores the extent to which this research currently influences undergraduate instruction, and identifies the intellectual and material resources required to further develop DBER. Discipline-Based Education Research provides guidance for future DBER research. In addition, the findings and recommendations of this report may invite, if not assist, post-secondary institutions to increase interest and research activity in DBER and improve its quality and usefulness across all natural science disciples, as well as guide instruction and assessment across natural science courses to improve student learning. The book brings greater focus to issues of student attrition in the natural sciences that are related to the quality of instruction. Discipline-Based Education Research will be of interest to educators, policy makers, researchers, scholars, decision makers in universities, government agencies, curriculum developers, research sponsors, and education advocacy groups.
Science Teaching Essentials: Short Guides to Good Practice serves as a reference manual for science faculty as they set up a new course, consider how to teach the course, figure out how to assess their students fairly and efficiently, and review and revise course materials. This book consists of a series of short chapters that instructors can use as resources to address common teaching problems and adopt evidence-based pedagogies. By providing individual chapters that can be used independently as needed, this book provides faculty with a just-in-time teaching resource they can use to draft a new syllabus. This is a must-have resource for science, health science and engineering faculty, as well as graduate students and post-docs preparing for future faculty careers. - Provides easily digested, practical, research-based information on how to teach - Allows faculty to efficiently get up-to-speed on a given pedagogy or assessment method - Addresses the full range of faculty experiences as they being to teach for the first time or want to reinvent how they teach
