Welcome to the School Librarians Advancing STEM Learning project, a 3-year project that brings together teachers and school librarians to curate and create sets of STEM resources. The goal is to support professional learning cohorts to elevate and expand the role of school librarians, and transform their capacities as instructional leaders toward advancements in STEM learning.This project is led by ISKME, in partnership with the New Hampshire Department of Education, Granite State College, and New Hampshire's Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) Network. The project is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services. 

The lab starts with a short lecture on the scientific method, after which students observe the results of a flume run that includes skeletal clasts. They form hypotheses about how bone clasts (or any clast for that matter) move and are deposited by a flow, then the students test their hypotheses by running a flume trial. The hypothesis tests take place in small groups (3-5 students), and the lab ends with homework where students use the information they learned from their hypothesis tests to interpret a fossil assemblage. As such, this is a wonderful activity for introductory geology classes, could be used effectively with minor adjustments for advanced paleontology, taphonomy, and forensic physical anthropology classes.

This book is designed to introduce non-science majors to the nature of science as a reliable method of acquiring knowledge about the natural world. Interdisciplinary content will draw together diverse physical and life sciences to increase scientific literacy and critical thinking skills for introductory-level students.

Contains handouts, slides and material used in the 2016 ALA Annual Conference AASL presentation on the 3-year IMLS project, School Librarians Advancing STEM Learning. June 26, 2016, Orlando, FL.

The online educational resource Physics For Everyone is the scaffolding for a 3 contact hour, 3 credit general education course that conveys the relevance, beauty, and power of physics as a foundation of science and technology in the public interest.

This slide deck provides the outline for the semester-long course. Each week’s lecture topics, with key points to be covered, are highlighted in two slides, which also list writing prompts, problem-solving exercises, and labs. Also, we have curated a list of high-quality online video resources that students (and instructors) should use to help them learn (and teach) physics ideas and concepts using demonstrations, animations, and humor. Many of those videos are parts of larger series and programs, created by some of the most skilled and popular online presenters in the world; that means some of their content is commercially sponsored, but all the content is free to students and instructors. Finally, we have envisioned this course so that students are assessed with a large set of low-stakes, just-in-time-type assignments and laboratory exercises.

This work has been generously supported by New America’s PIT-UN (Public Interest Technology University Network) challenge grant program, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.

Recorded webinar session from March 30, 2016, presented as a professional learning component to STEM teacher and school librarian participants of the IMLS funded School Librarians Advancing STEM Learning (#SLASL 2016) project. Webinar #2: Text-based Questioning

High school science teacher Tyler DeWitt was ecstatic about a lesson plan on bacteria (how cool!) -- and devastated when his students hated it. The problem was the textbook: it was impossible to understand. He delivers a rousing call for science teachers to ditch the jargon and extreme precision, and instead make science sing through stories and demonstrations. (Filmed at TEDxBeaconStreet.)

This template provides an approach for creating a STEM investigation that includes text-based inquiry to build student STEM literacy skills. It is populated with examples and resources to support your authoring. The template was created to support library media specialists and STEM teacher cohorts in year two of the School Librarians Advancing STEM Learning project, led by the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management (ISKME) in partnership with Granite State University, New Hampshire, and funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Educators who chose to remix this template will trade out example language with their own language and design.