SC.912.N.2.5

Students will explore the critical contributions that led to the development of the Cell Theory and those that led to the development of our constitutional republic. They will also be able to explain how both science and politics involve people working together from various backgrounds and specialities to build ideas and solve problems in this integrated lesson plan.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will connect the concepts of Cell Theory and our founding documents by researching cell related issues including cancer cells, stem cells, and cloning. They will be able to explain how new ideas and unique solutions require people of various backgrounds and specialities working together and how the founding documents created a system of government that works to protect the rights of both scientists and public health.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will learn about the foundational ideas behind the Cell Theory and the U.S. government and begin to understand how both science and politics involve people from different backgrounds and specialities working together to build ideas and solve problems in this integrated lesson plan.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students will work collaboratively to investigate the current use of fission as an energy source in various nations across the world, as well as the safety risks associated. They will also explore the potential of fusion as a future energy source and how their assigned nation/organization interacts globally with the scientific community to further its progress.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will analyze an intended to support reading in the content area. The research article discusses different languages as barriers to the transfer of knowledge within the scientific community and then provides potential resolutions to aid in the reduction of language barriers. This lesson includes a note-taking guide, text-dependent questions, a writing prompt, answer keys, and a writing rubric.

Type: Lesson Plan

Cleaning Up Your Act Model Eliciting Activity (MEA) provides students with a real world engineering problem in which they must work as a team to design a procedure to select the best material for cleaning up an oil spill. The main focus of this MEA is to recognize the consequences of a catastrophic event, and understand the environmental and economical impact based on data analysis. Students will conduct individual and team investigations in order to arrive at a scientifically sound solution to the problem.

Model Eliciting Activities, MEAs, are open-ended, interdisciplinary problem-solving activities that are meant to reveal students’ thinking about the concepts embedded in realistic situations. Click here to learn more about MEAs and how they can transform your classroom.

Type: Lesson Plan

This PBS/NOVA lesson combines a discussion of the Nature of Science using a renowned Cancer researcher (and supported by the profiles of several other renowned scientists in the activities) to study concepts of creativity and tentativeness in the Nature of Science with a study of the biological characteristics of cells in disease (cancer).

Type: Lesson Plan

A PBS Nova Podcast/Video with accompanying activities that introduce and explore paleontology and the geologic timescale through analysis of fossil bones.

Type: Lesson Plan

Discover how Isaac Newton's background, talents, interests, and goals influenced his groundbreaking work in this interactive tutorial.

This is part 4 in a 4-part series. Click below to explore the other tutorials in the series.

• Part 1: Discovering Newton's First Law of Motion: On the Soccer Pitch
• Part 2: Discovering Newton’s Second Law of Motion: On the Softball Diamond
• Part 3: Discovering Newton’s Third Law of Motion: On the Basketball Court

Type: Original Student Tutorial

Researchers Frank Johnson, Richard Bertram, Wei Wu, and Rick Hyson explore the necessity of scientific and mathematical collaboration in modern neuroscience, as it relates to their NSF research on birdsong.

Type: Perspectives Video: Expert

This PBS/NOVA presentation tells the story of the CERN and the Large Hadron Collider project - an amazing ongoing investigation in search of an answer to the mysteries that still exist in particle physics. Recommended discussions and activities before and after the video are provided.

Type: Teaching Idea

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article describes a Google Scholar survey, focusing on environmental issues, as the basis for presenting an argument that language is a barrier to global communication in the scientific community. The recognized barriers are two-fold: the limitation of knowledge transfer and the inability of local policy makers to make decisions based on existing knowledge. The article provides possible solutions to the problem, including the "multilingualization" of texts through changes in journal requirements.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. This article describes the collision course between citizens and scientists as "makers" and "hobbyists" begin aiding and supplementing the scientific community more and more. The article gives many examples of amateurs helping out on active projects, especially when science cannot dedicate the hours or money necessary to complete them.

Type: Text Resource

The article explains how some famous scientific discoveries that happened "by accident" more accurately resulted from scientific habits of mind, which allowed researchers to take full advantage of these serendipitous moments.

Type: Text Resource

The insight, innovation, and persistence of James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins led to a detailed understanding of the structure of DNA, the stuff that genes are made of. This discovery brought together information from many disciplines and many researchers to answer one of the most fundamental questions in life science: How do living things pass on traits to their offspring?

Type: Text Resource

This series of lessons introduces students to evolutionary reasoning and to the explanatory power of the Darwinian model of natural selection. Students read three evolutionary scientists' (Paley, Lamarck and Darwin) original work and compare their thinking, proposed mechanism of evolution, use of evidence, and explanatory power of their theory. They apply the three scientists thinking to another scenario to refine their understanding of the explanations.

Type: Unit/Lesson Sequence