Creating Scientists (Eye on Education)

Book Synopsis: Teach your students how to BE scientists! This book shows you how to create living, breathing scientists by shifting your teaching from a content focus to a hands-on, practice focus, where students discover science by doing science. As required by the new Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), this practical book provides a clear, research verified framework for building lessons that teach science practice abilities, such as gathering and making sense of data, constructing explanations, designing experiments, and communicating information. Creating Scientists features reproducible, immediately deployable tools and handouts that you can use in the classroom to assess your students' learning within the domains for the NGSS or any standards framework that focuses on the integration of science practice with content. This book is an invaluable resource for educators seeking to build a "community of practice," where students discover ideas through well-taught, hands-on, authentic science experiences that foster an innate love for learning how the world works.

Creating Scientists will provide the following: an approachable introduction to the relevant research on what science practice is, how it can be taught, and how it can be assessed; specific, immediately deployable classroom activities that serve as examples of putting theory into practice; anda framework you can use to create new lessons for your specific content needs - all in the context of next generation standards worldwide, like the Core and NGSS in the United States.

The framework and activities described in the book are all research-based and demonstrated to work. They will provide you the classroom tools necessary to help your students gain the ability to do science and discover, rather than just memorize science facts.