Curriculum

Environmental education is essential for protecting and restoring natural water sources. Integrating education with positive environmental experiences can instill values and stewardship in the public, encouraging proactive steps to preserve and enhance water resources. Elementary teachers can incorporate real-world water-related environmental issues into their classrooms, promoting critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Place-based education, which involves experiential learning in local settings, effectively builds connections between students and their communities. Authentic water-focused climate science learning should anchor in local phenomena, fostering student inquiry and validating student voices.

Educative curriculum materials (ECM) have been shown to support K-12 teacher learning, but little is known about teacher educators’ use of ECM. In this study, we report on enactments of ECM designed to support the development of preservice elementary teachers’ content knowledge for teaching about matter in two different courses to understand how teacher educators use ECM.

Educative curriculum materials (ECM) have been shown to support K-12 teacher learning, but little is known about teacher educators’ use of ECM. In this study, we report on enactments of ECM designed to support the development of preservice elementary teachers’ content knowledge for teaching about matter in two different courses to understand how teacher educators use ECM.

Water scarcity poses a significant global challenge, which is often overlooked, particularly in regions with abundant water resources. This article outlines a curriculum designed for middle school students (grades 6–8) that addresses the dynamics of water scarcity and sustainability through five detailed lessons centered around the water cycle.

Teachers play a central role in designing structures which encourage the development of students’ individual creative capacity and the classroom’s sense of community. We offer considerations for designing engaging and collaborative experiences in elementary and intermediate computing education.

Studying moths is an excellent way to include students in science practices by introducing them to a ubiquitous but under-appreciated animal group that can be found in their local places, including urban, suburban, agricultural, forested, and other habitats. In this paper, we share a simple, low-cost method that can allow individual students or groups to collect moth specimens and begin to ask and answer questions about moth diversity and abundance in their local community.

This collection of curriculum units focus on the biology topics of natural selection, matter and energy, and genetics. Each unit contains a series of lessons, videos, and materials for students and teachers.

This curriculum workbook details a design process for engaging elementary students in citizen science investigations that are relevant to their school district’s curriculum and school site. The citizen science guide is designed to help users critically examine potential citizen science projects to determine whether they can be easily adapted for use in a classroom curriculum and schoolyard setting.

The ASET Toolkit is a Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) planning toolkit designed to help science educators plan lessons and units that integrate the 3 dimensions outlined in the Framework (NRC, 2012). The toolkit includes: 1) Dialogic tools that foster and support deepening awareness and understanding of how to make the significant shifts in instruction, learning, and formative assessment required by the new science reform documents, and 2) Analytical tools for revising existing and/or developing new curriculum that better supports 3-dimensional teaching, learning, and formative assessment of student learning.

With the LRHE curriculum, student learning is used in the generation of solutions to local problems, such as increasing indigenous populations of insects within local urban neighborhoods. The learning approach—solutioning—emphasizes learning life science content through the NGSS science and engineering practices.