Blog

A new science teaching standard implemented in New Mexico last year is intended to help students learn in a more hands-on way, and a group of Grant County educators is leading the way in helping teachers incorporate this new standard into classrooms here. The Grant County Making Sense of Science Leadership Team has hosted three… Read more »

School is out for summer. But in Tracy, Calif., teachers have been hard at work. Inside the staff development training room at the Tracy Unified School District, a group of about 25 teachers and curriculum specialists gathered this summer to overhaul the district’s approach to teaching science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM. The plan… Read more »

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Because some people are more than uncomfortable with the current established views of such things as evolution and climate change, they cling to the belief that those scientific facts aren’t any more real or settled than, say, the old view that the Earth was the center of the… Read more »

Who knew that the table game Mouse Trap has seven subsystems? After a class period of exploration, sixth-graders in Greg Busse’s class not only knew about subsystems, they could identify where each started and ended in the game. Early in the semester, students were asked to use the game, where the object is to successfully… Read more »

The Alaska State Board of Education unanimously approved new science standards on Friday, which are much more detailed about topics like climate change and evolution than the ones previously recommended for schools. It’s been more than a decade since the state reviewed how science is taught in the classroom. The new standards are based on a model called Next Generation Science… Read more »

Step into Godwin Heights (Michigan) High School biology teacher Cory Klocko’s classroom on any given day, and you’re bound to see few eyes on the teacher. Rather, you’ll see students discussing, hypothesizing and testing their theories to answer questions such as “Why is Addie sick?” Addie is a character in one of three narratives provided… Read more »

A State School Board committee on Friday approved new science standards for Utah public school students in grades K through five and nine through 12, but not before some pushback on the teaching of evolution and climate change. Except for some slight tweaks, the proposed standards were approved by the Standards and Assessment Committee and… Read more »

New science standards have been adopted in some form by forty-three states (the most recent being Maine), based on some combination of the Next Generation Science Standards and the National Research Council’s Framework for K-12 Science Education. But that’s hardly the final word for instilling more STEM into the classroom. A new report from Achieve, a survey among state education… Read more »

Congratulations to Maine. Governor Janet Mills signed LD 283, which contained the revised science and engineering standards in the Maine Learning Results. The revised standards are an adoption of the Next Generation Science Standards. The signed bill is currently going through the Maine Administrative Procedure Act to officially become law through the Secretary of State’s… Read more »

FLINT, MI– A $74,000 grant from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration has been awarded to Flint for the development and implementation of water quality monitoring program for the city’s river. The program, Flint River Green Bridges, is an expansion of the city’s existing Flint River Green program that’s implemented in 22 local school districts and… Read more »