A one page assignment that uses online tutorials to give students a first exposure to the components of a cell and membrane.

In this activity, students will learn about the Mercalli Scale for rating earthquakes. Also, students will make a booklet with drawings that represent each rating of the scale.

Students observe and discuss a cup and pencil model of a cyclone to better understand the science behind how this pollutant recovery method functions in cleaning industrial air pollution.

In this activity, students investigate the properties of a heterogeneous mixture, trail mix, as if it were a contaminated soil sample near a construction site. This activity shows students that heterogeneous mixtures can be separated by physical means, and that when separated, all the parts will equal the whole.

The first exam in a class holds an opportunity for metacognitive teaching. At this point the student is open to hearing your message, especially if their outcome is less than they had hoped. This example walks through some strategies for implementing metacognitive teaching wrapped around the first exam.

The intervention, Metacogntive Prompting Intervention - Science (MPI-S), consists of checklists and questions organized into four developmental phases strategically placed into lesson plans. Each set of metacognitive prompts represent ideas from one of the seven aspects of the nature of science. Students 1) receive an exemplary model of the scientific thinking task needed in the inquiry, 2) attempt a similar scientific thinking task with support in the form of a checklist, 3) attempt a more difficult scientific thinking task with faded support and report their reasoning behind their decisions, and 4) independently accomplish the science thinking task while reflecting on its alignment with established ways of knowing in science.
Metacognitive components of the activity
The prompts are based on Zimmerman's cyclical theory of self-regulation: forethought, performance, and self reflection. Students begin a science task with forethought (prior knowledge from experiences), then perform the science task with a combination of science process skills and content knowledge, then self-reflect on the alignment of the outcome to an "expert" outcome. One pathway through the cycle develops more knowledge that is forethought in the next cycle of self-regulation. The prompts encourage students to reflect on their observations and conclusions in an inquiry activity and compare their results to the expectations of the scientific community.
Metacognitive goals for this activity:
Students are expected to compare their processes and outcomes during an inquiry activity to the ways of knowing in science. Are students aligned with the ways knowledge is constructed and validated in the scientific enterprise?
Assessing students' metacognition
Over the past three years, I have tested the prompts with an experimental design in 8th grade classes. Experimental groups significantly outperform comparison groups in content knowledge and in nature of science knowledge regardless of the years of experience of the teacher. Additionally, the prompts have shown promise in qualitative studies in encouraging pre-service teachers to design lesson plans with explicit nature of science teachable moments woven through the entire school year.

The goal of this activity is for students to learn how to tell a story in order to make a complex topic (such as global warming or ozone holes) easier for a reader to grasp. Students realize that the narrative impulse underlies even scientific and technical writing and gain a better understanding of the role of myth as a "science" of imagination that helps us to gain insight into human motivation.

This group learning activity involves students in an engaging review of concepts of microbiology. The review is set up as a power point presentation in the style of the "Jeopardy" gameshow where students groups compete against each other to answer review questions.

This assignment walks students through the creation of an Excel spreadsheet, step by step. It includes numerical fills via copy, creation of fixed and relative formulas, formula fill via copy, and some summary functions.

This classroom task gives students the opportunity to prove a surprising fact about quadrilaterals: that if we join the midpoints of an arbitrary quadrilateral to form a new quadrilateral, then the new quadrilateral is a parallelogram, even if the original quadrilateral was not.

This is a reasonably direct task aimed at having students use previously-derived results to learn new facts about parallelograms, as opposed to deriving them from first principles. The solution provided (among other possibilities) uses the SAS trial congruence theorem, and the fact that opposite sides of parallelograms are congruent.

Thousands of orange and black shapes flutter through the trees. Welcome to one of the few wintering homes of the monarch butterfly. Also in: Spanish

The first two parts of this task ask students to interpret the meaning of signed numbers and reason based on that meaning in a context where the meaning of zero is already given by convention.

In this task students are asked to write two expressions from verbal descriptions and determine if they are equivalent. The expressions involve both percent and fractions. This task is most appropriate for a classroom discussion since the statement of the problem has some ambiguity.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum/Geology of National Parks module. Students calculate the amount of rock removed and the value of copper produced at the great Keweenaw District up to 1925.

This activity is a lab investigation in which students make mass/volume measurements of several samples of the same mineral to determine the mineral's density. Students graph their data and make the connection between their qualitative understanding of what density is and the mathematical/graphical representation of density.

Students explore how different materials (sand, gravel, lava rock) with different water contents on different slopes result in landslides of different severity. They measure the severity by how far the landslide debris extends into model houses placed in the flood plain. This activity is a small-scale model of a debris chute currently being used by engineers and scientists to study landslide characteristics. Much of this activity setup is the same as for the Survive That Tsunami activity in Lesson 5 of the Natural Disasters unit.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum module. Students use Excel Solver to find the linear combination of servings of two specified foods that minimize cost while meeting nutritional requirements.

This outdoor investigation involves students observing, recording, comparing and pondering the differing landscapes and rocks located along a river. Follow-up class sessions involve student generation of investigable questions, student-generated studies with required write-up and a mapping activity.

In this biology field experience, students will explore trees of Minnesota. Working in cooperative groups, students will discover biodiversity of trees and determine populations of tree species through observation and use of dichotomous keys.