Antibiotics save people’s lives...and make bacteria stronger and more likely to kill us.  What is the best practice to balance these conflicting issues? In this problem-based learning module, the students will be evaluating real-life medical situations in conjunction with actual staff at those institutions and offering action plans to be ‘implemented’ there.  In order to accomplish this, the science unit will be interlocking with social studies and a language arts unit that will have them identifying target audiences and sculpting a way to present their findings.  This unit has the potential to be a full problem-based unit as well as highly interdisciplinary--it’s connected to full units in social studies and language arts which stand alone but can be fully integrated if desired.

Students learn about the amazing adaptations of the ptarmigan to the alpine tundra. They focus one adaptation, the feathered feet of the ptarmigan, and ask whether the feathers serve to only keep the feet warm or to also provide the bird with floatation capability. They create model ptarmigan feet, with and without feathers, and test the hypothesis on the function of the feathers. Ultimately, students make a claim about whether the feathers provide floatation and support this claim with their testing evidence.

This book is intended for use by future teachers, written from the perspective of students who have taken Science Methods II. The student authors gathered and created resources to help prospective elementary cience teachers better understand science and feel confident in your abilities as a future teacher.
This book is divided into five parts which align with the Science Methods II course:

Physics
Space Science
Earth Science
Climate Science
Course Materials and Pedagogy

Within each part, the material is broken down into smaller chapters. Here you will find written explanations, video links, glossary terms, key takeaways, and practice quizzes to help you understand the material. This book is designed to be a flexible resource; use it as much or as little as you need throughout the course.

This Immersion Unit provides a coherent series of lessons designed to guide students in developing deep conceptual understanding that is aligned with the standards, key science concepts, and essential features of classroom inquiry (as defined by the National Science Education Standards).  Unit Overarching Concepts Populations of living organisms change or stay the same over time as a result of the interactions between the genetic variations that are expressed by the individuals in the populations and the environment in which the population lives. Science knowledge advances through inquiry. Unit Supporting Concepts Individual organisms with certain variations of traits (adaptations) are more likely than others to survive and reproduce successfully.When environmental conditions change it can affect the survival of both individual organisms and entire species. Natural selection determines the differential survival of groups of organisms. A small advantage in escaping a predator, resisting a drug, etc. can lead to the spread of a trait in a modest number of generations. Mutations are a source of variation in an individual’s genotype, and it can result in a change in phenotype––good or bad. Scientific progress is made by asking meaningful questions and conducting careful investigations, using appropriate tools and technology to perform tests, collect data, analyze relationships, and display data. No matter how well one scientific explanation fits observations, a new explanation might fit them just as well or better, or might fit a wider range of observations. In science, the testing, revising, and occasional discarding of explanations, new and old, never ends. This unit was developed through the large Math and Science Partnership project called System-wide Change for All Learners and Educators (SCALE), involving a collaboration among Los Angeles School District educators, California State University science and education faculty, and UW-Madison SCALE staff.

Download this complete and coherently designed, middle school level unit to teach fundamental concepts that underpin the theory of evolution. The unit was collaboratively designed by teachers, college faculty & staff, and the Fast Plants Program at UW-Madison to support student-centered inquiry-based learning. The unit's storyline is underpinned by the 5E model. Like three dimensional learning as described by the Next Generation Science Standards, this unit is designed for students to learn academic content by working like scientists: making observations, asking questions, doing further investigations to explore and explain natural phenomena, and communicating results based on evidence. Immersion Units are intended to support teachers in building a learning culture in their classrooms to sustain students’ enthusiasm for engaging in scientific habits of thinking while learning rigorous science content.

This fill-in-the-blank timeline is a planning tool for teachers to use when figuring out when to begin the steps associated with conducting a two-generation artificial selection experiment using Fast Plants. Teachers preparing for any selection experiment will find this timeline helpful, including those planning for the AP Biology Lab 1 of Big Idea 1: Evolution, Artificial Selection.

The University of Iowa Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research and College of Education teamed up to develop free eighth grade science curricula on land use and climate science, in response to Iowa’s grade level alignment of the middle school Next Generation Science Standards.

Primary author Dr. Ted Neal, clinical associate professor of science education, led a team of graduate and pre-service teaching students and CGRER scientists to develop the material. They grouped standards, resources and lesson material into six bundles, each designed to engage Iowa’s middle schoolers with local data and information on relevant topics like athletic concussions and agriculture.

These lessons are built on NGSS principles and put learning in the students’ hands with hands-on activities for groups and individuals. Kids will have ample opportunity to get curious, generate questions and lead themselves to answers.

Hundreds of scientific articles. Written for middle and high school students. Approved by scientists. Free.