Science and Mathematics Education Commons^™

Physics Portfolios: A Picture Of Student Understanding, Brooke A. Whitworth, Randy L. Bell

Publications

Traditionally, teachers assess students' physics understanding through lab activities, responses to open-ended word problems, and tests. But there's another way to measure student understanding, one in which students apply their learning to the world around them. This article shows how to implement student portfolios, which allow students to set goals they can monitor throughout the year and actively participate in assessment. When students build portfolios, they can evaluate and reflect on their own work, promoting engagement with the course and content (Danielson and Abrutyn 1997), and teachers can better assess students' goal movement and see growth in students' conceptual understanding. …

Gaise In Discipline-Specific Courses, Beverly Wood

Publications

While acknowledging the diverse setting, audience, and purpose of introductory courses, existing research assumes that courses offered by different disciplines share the same goals and teaching practices. The purpose of this study is to examine the objectives for student outcomes and pedagogical delivery of introductory statistics courses designed for students in a specific major, providing explicit evidence for this assumption.

The American Statistical Association’s Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) are meant to apply to all introductory courses. The College Report’s Goals for Students and Recommendations for Teaching are used as a framework for a qualitative study …

Obstacles To Developing Digital Literacy On The Internet In Middle School Science Instruction, Jamie Colwell, Sarah Hunt-Barron, David Reinking

Publications

Obstacles, and instructional responses to them, that emerged in two middle school science classes during a formative experiment investigating Internet Reciprocal Teaching (IRT), an instructional intervention aimed at increasing digital literacy on the Internet, are reported in this manuscript. Analysis of qualitative data revealed that IRT enabled students to explain and demonstrate appropriate strategies for locating and evaluating information on the Internet when they were asked to do so. However, students did not use these strategies or they quickly abandoned them when working independently or in small groups during inquiry projects. Data revealed three obstacles that inhibited efforts to promote …

Teacher's Toolkit: Differentiating Inquiry, Brooke A. Whitworth, Jennifer L. Maeng, Randy L. Bell

Publications

Differentiated instruction and teaching science as inquiry are two pedagogical approaches frequently discussed among science teachers. Teachers know these approaches are important but often have difficulty translating them into their classroom science instruction. This article describes how to differentiate a density investigation for variations in student readiness by varying the level of inquiry using an approach that is easily translated to experiments in any science content area.