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Students will transfer the knowledge they gained from their researched environmental issue in part 1 and the policy making process in part 2 to now draft a policy that works to solve the issue they originally researched. Students will then engage in an activity in order to argue and defend their policy and to ensure that it is the most effective solution for their environmental issue. This is lesson 3 of 3 in a mini-unit integrating civics and biology.

Type: Lesson Plan

Type: Lesson Plan

The changing climate is an important topic for both scientific analysis and worldly knowledge. This lesson uses data collected by the National Snow and Ice Data Center to create and use mathematical models as a predictive tool and do critical analysis of sea ice loss.

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

In this lesson, students will analyze an informational text intended to support reading in the content area. The article addresses an innovative possible treatment for diabetes using cone snail venom. The venom contains a form of insulin that is faster acting than human insulin. Further research shows that the cone snail insulin requires no prep before it is used, therefore explaining its quick response time. The lesson plan includes a note-taking guide, text-dependent questions, a writing prompt, answer keys, and a writing rubric. Numerous options to extend the lesson are also included.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will analyze an intended to support reading in the content area. The article presents new research that suggests dinosaurs were not able to vocalize or "sing" in a way similar to modern birds. The lesson plan includes a note-taking guide, text-dependent questions, a writing prompt, answer keys, and a writing rubric. Numerous options to extend the lesson are also included.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will analyze an informational text resource intended to support reading in the content area. This text describes scientists' research on identifying "habitable" planets and explains how failed attempts might actually open the doors to more thorough research and understanding. Scientists faced the challenge of collecting specific data in order to determine if bodies qualified as planets. When research revealed that their original hypotheses were incorrect, scientists were able to take the new information and apply it to further investigations. The lesson plan includes a note-taking guide, text-dependent questions, a writing prompt, answer keys, and a writing rubric. Options to extend the lesson are included.

Type: Lesson Plan

In this lesson, students will analyze an informational text that seeks to answer the question "Why do we yawn?" Students will learn that while many claims regarding the social and physiological functions of yawning have been presented from Hippocrates, 17th and 18th century scientists, and experts today, scientists have yet to reach a consensus about the answer to the title question. All the while, this frequent challenge and re-examination of scientific claims helps to strengthen scientific knowledge. This lesson plan includes a note-taking guide, text-dependent questions, a writing prompt, answer keys, and a writing rubric, as well as options to extend the lesson.

Type: Lesson Plan

Students identify claims about UV exposure presented in a selection of media items, then design, execute, and report the results of an experiment designed to test one such claim.

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

Learn how to test scientific claims and judge competing hypotheses by understanding how they can be tested against one another in this interactive tutorial.

Type: Original Student Tutorial

It is often difficult, sometimes impossible, to get a definitive answer to some of life's most enduring questions. Scientific processes provide alternative explanations for a wide variety of phenomena by piecing together all the available information. This interactive activity on the Evolution website explores four possible hypotheses to explain what caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, inviting the viewer to consider the evidence and come to their own decision.

Type: Presentation/Slideshow

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. Scientists have presented new findings on the fossilized voice box called a syrinx -- and its apparent absence in non-avian dinosaur fossils of the same age. This may indicate that other non-avian dinosaurs were not able to make noises similar to the bird calls we hear today.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the context area. The text describes how cone snail venom, a simpler form of insulin than human insulin, works more rapidly. Diabetes is a disease that occurs when the body is no longer to control the glucose levels in the bloodstream. Cone snail venom could help scientists develop a better, more efficient way of treating diabetes.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is designed to support reading in the content area. The author describes research on identifying "habitable" planets and explains how failed attempts might actually open the doors to more thorough research. Scientists faced the challenge of collecting specific data in order to determine if readings pointed to the existence of a planet. When research revealed that their original hypotheses were incorrect, the scientists were able to take the new information and apply it to further investigations.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is designed to support reading in the content area. The article seeks to answer the question, "Why do we yawn?" Scientists have yet to reach consensus about the function of yawning. Social and physiological claims about why we yawn are presented from Hippocrates, 17th and 18th century scientists, and scientists today.

Type: Text Resource

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area.

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

This informational text resource is intended to support reading in the content area. The article discusses how neutrinos seem to be arriving at their destination slightly faster than mathematically calculated and describes how the discovery of new scientific evidence must undergo scrutiny from many angles before being accepted.

Type: Text Resource

Click "View Site" to open a full-screen version. This tutorial is designed to help secondary science teachers learn how to integrate literacy skills within their science curriculum. This tutorial focuses on using specific textual evidence to support students' responses as they analyze science texts. The focus on literacy across content areas is designed to help students independently build knowledge in different disciplines through reading and writing.

Type: Tutorial

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