Uncovering Student Ideas Series

Author Page Keeley continues to provide K 12 teachers with her highly usable and popular formula for uncovering and addressing the preconceptions that students bring to the classroom— the formative assessment probe— in this first book devoted exclusively to life science in her Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series. In this volume, Keeley addresses the topics of life and its diversity; structure and function; life processes and needs of living things; ecosystems and change; reproduction, life cycles, and heredity; and human biology. Using the probes as diagnostic tools that identify and analyze students' preconceptions, teachers can easily move students from where they are in their current thinking to where they need to be to achieve scientific understanding. At the same time, use of the probes deepens the teacher's understanding of the subject matter, suggests instructional implications, and expands assessment literacy. Using the student-learning data gained through the probes to inform teaching and learning is what makes the probes formative. Each probe is supported by extensive Teacher Notes, which provide background information on the purpose of the probes, related concepts, explanations of the life science ideas being taught, related ideas in the national science standards, research on typical student misconceptions in life science, and suggestions for instruction and assessment.

If you' re new to formative assessment probes, you' ll love this timely addition to the bestselling Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series. Authors Page Keeley and Laura Tucker give you 32 engaging questions, or probes, that can reveal what your students already know— or think they know— about core Earth and environmental science concepts. Armed with those insights, you can use the probes' teacher notes to adjust your approach and present the science in grade-appropriate ways so students will learn the content accurately. If you' re among the thousands of educators who love the Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series and crave probes specifically about Earth and environmental science, you' re in luck. The probes are organized into four sections: land and water; water cycle, weather, and climate; Earth history, weathering and erosion, and plate tectonics; and natural resources, pollution, and human impact. The 10th book in this wildly popular, award-winning series offers field-tested teacher materials that provide science background and link to national standards, including the Next Generation Science Standards. The new probes are short, ready to reproduce, and easy to use. Why wait? It' s time to help your students demystify why the ocean is salty, how old the Earth is, and which direction water swirls when it goes down the drain.

Because you demanded it! Since publication of Volume 1 of this series, thousands of teachers are using these innovative classroom tools to improve student learning in science. Following in the footsteps of earlier volumes in the Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series, this all-new book provides short, easy-to-administer probes that determine what misconceptions students bring to the classroom about the nature of science and about physical, life, Earth, and space sciences. This new volume in our bestselling series provides more topic areas for classroom use as well as guidance on how teachers can use the probes for their own learning. As outlined in previous volumes, teachers— like their students— can have misconceptions that come to the fore when administering the probes. Volume 3 provides 10 detailed suggestions for teachers on how to use the probes to uncover, accurately assess, and correct their own preconceptions as well as their students' (e.g., do the probes yourself, examine student responses with other teachers, embed the probes into existing professional development programs, select specific areas to focus on, examine student thinking across grade spans, categorize ideas, and crunch data to create classroom profiles). Volume 3 offers five life science probes, seven Earth and space science probes, ten physical science probes, and three nature of science probes. This volume is an invaluable resource for classroom teachers, preservice teachers, professional developers, and college science and preservice faculty.

Have you been wanting to learn more about what your students know (or think they know) about major concepts in matter and energy? Have you been wishing for formative assessment tools in both English and Spanish? Then this is the book you' ve been waiting for. Like the other 10 books in the bestselling Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series, Uncovering Student Ideas in Physical Science, Volume 3 does the following: • Presents engaging questions, also known as formative assessment probes. The 32 probes in this book are designed to uncover what students know— or think they know— about the concept of matter and particle model of matter; properties of matter; classifying matter, chemical properties, and chemical reactions; and nuclear processes and energy. The probes will help you uncover students' existing beliefs about everything from a particle model of matter to ways of describing energy. • Offers field-tested teacher materials that provide the best answers along with distracters designed to reveal conceptual misunderstandings that students commonly hold. Since the content is explained in clear, everyday language, teachers can improve their own understanding of the science they teach. • Is convenient and saves you time. The probes are short, easy-to-administer activities for speakers of both English and Spanish that come ready to reproduce. In addition to explaining the science content, the teacher materials include connections to A Framework for K 12 Science Education and the Next Generation Science Standards, provide summaries of the research on students' ideas, and suggest grade-appropriate instructional methods for addressing students' ideas. Uncovering Student Ideas in Physical Science, Volume 3 has the potential to help you transform your teaching. As the authors write in the book' s introduction, “ When teachers take the time to uncover [existing] ideas, understand where they came from, and make instructional decisions that will help students give up their strongly held ideas in favor of scientific ways of thinking, they are taking an important first step in teaching for conceptual understanding.”