In this activity, students examine a photograph of the night sky and answer questions about their observations. The picture, taken by a high school student in upstate New York, offers insight into the Earth's rotation, apparent star motion, the location of Polaris (the North Star), circumpolar constellations, and pointer stars.

Students apply the analytical skills that they use when reading literature to an exploration of the underlying meaning and symbolism in Hieronymous Bosch's early Renaissance painting "Death and the Miser".

As teachers, one of our primary responsibilities is to help students understand and analyze various types of texts. To do this effectively, we need to have a solid understanding of the text ourselves. This learning activity will help you develop your skills in analyzing texts and prepare you to help your students do the same.

These primary source excerpts are broken into 2 groups: Cuban perspectives and American perspectives of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Consider having students work in pairs or small groups to read, discussion and answer the questions for their perspective. Then have students from both perspectives share observations. Consider using a guided question such as "Why are views so different for the same event, especially of those who fought at the Bay of Pigs?"

In this task, the students are not asked to find an answer, but are asked to analyze word problems and explain their thinking. In the process, they are faced with varying ways of thinking about multiplication.

In this activity, students will focus on a letter written to Congress about Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. Students will see that, due to television coverage, the author, Mrs. Jackson, was very aware of the events that day even though she was in a different part of the country: Brooklyn, New York. Students will also look at the author's tone and word choice to discern the kinds of images shown on television.

Use this assignment to help analyze a photograph on a deeper level and get a better understanding of media literacy.

Students explore the ballads genre by reading medieval ballads to deduce their characteristics, acting out the ballads, comparing medieval and modern ballads using Venn diagrams, and composing their own ballads.

Students analyze images of Oscar Wilde used to publicize his 1882 American lecture tour. They then compare a caricature to another researched image, sharing this analysis in a podcast.

This quarter-long project forms the basis of a third-year course for majors and nonmajors at the University of Washington, Bothell called Science Methods and Practice. Students use databases to identify novel research questions, and extract data to test their hypotheses. They frame the question with primary literature, address the questions with inferential statistics, and discuss the results with more primary literature. The product is a scientific paper; each step of the process is scaffolded and evaluated. Given time limitations, we avoid devoting time to data collection; instead, we sharpen
students' ability to make sense of a large body of quantitative data, a situation they may rarely have encountered.

We treat statistics with a strictly conceptual, pragmatic, and abbreviated approach; i.e., we ask students to know which basic test to choose to assess a linear relationship vs. a difference between two means. We stress the need for a normal distribution
in order to use these tests, and how to interpret the results; we leave the rest for stats courses, and we do not teach the mathematics. This approach proves beneficial even to those who have already had a statistics course, because it is often the first time
they make decisions about applying statistics to their own research questions.

We incorporate peer review and collaborative work throughout the quarter. We form collaborative groups around the research questions they ask, enabling them to share primary literature they find, and preparing them well to review each other's writing. We encourage them to cite each other's work. They write formal peer reviews of each other's papers, and they submit their final paper with a letter-to-the-editor highlighting how their research has addressed previous feedback.

A major advantage of this course is that an instructor can easily modify it to suit any area of expertise. Students have worked with data about how a snail's morphology changes in response to its environment (Price, 2012), how students understand genetic drift (Price et al. 2014), maximum body size in the fossil record (Payne et al. 2008), range shifts (Ettinger et al. 2011), and urban crop pollination (Waters and Clifford 2014).

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This activity will introduce pH testing of cleaning products, citrus fruits, and then analyzes a mystery Green product. Students will compare and contrast findings to discover an earth friendly product.

College-level adaptation of a chapter in the Earth Exploration Toolbook. Examine satellite images of atmospheric ozone in the Southern Hemisphere to study changes in concentration over a time.

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This online activity shows how to use FRED, the Federal Reserve's free online economic data website, to analyze changes in real gross domestic product (GDP) and GDP makeup over time. Following simple instructions, you will locate spending data for the individual components of real GDP, and then combine them into a highly informative area graph. You will also use FRED's ability to stack data and see how trade—imports and exports—contributes to GDP. The resulting customized graph will let you see how economic output varies from year to year.

Intermediate students are asked to analyze data on the components of consumption and investment expenditures and explanatory variables based on textbook models of each. Students look for rough correlations between the explanatory and dependent variables.

This lab activity has students rolling a marble down a ramp to study position, velocity, and acceleration. Based on a experiment performed by Galileo.

It is important for students to know how to evaluate messages conveyed by the news media. Exploration of the artistic techniques used in political cartoons leads to critical questioning.

Students explore and analyze the techniques that political (or editorial) cartoonists use and draw conclusions about why the cartoonists choose those techniques to communicate their messages.

This activity covers the causes, effects, and mitigation of urban heat in New York City. Students use data sets, graphs, maps and images to create their own plan for mitigation in their area. Robust satellite images, city data, tables, maps, and graphs are included in the resource for students to explore.

In this activity, students explore how the timing of color change and leaf drop of New England's deciduous trees is changing.

During a previous field trip to a local stream, students examine the stream and flood plain, evaluate evidence for high-discharge events, measure discharge, see the USGS gauging station for the stream and examine historical discharge records. Then, to prepare for hometown stream exercise, students chose a stream of personal interest to them and with at least 30 years of NWIS discharge data, and also gather personal knowledge and background information about their stream. The instructor uses Stony Brook data to model the project by downloading NWIS discharge data and using the data to a) describe the typical annual pattern of discharge, b) graphpeak annual discharge for the years of record, c) making a flood frequency graph and d) integrating background information into an analysis of the stream's discharge. Students then do this for their own streams. The activity involves students in accessing and analyzing real data, integrating background information into a technical analysis. They also gain experience with Microsoft Excel and via other students' work, learn about streams that can be quite different from their own.

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