New Releases

Designed as a ready-to-use survival guide for middle school Earth science teachers, this title is an invaluable resource that provides an entire year’s worth of inquiry-based and discovery-oriented Earth science lessons, including 33 investigations or labs, and 17 detailed projects.

This unique collection of astronomy, geology, meteorology, and physical oceanography lessons promotes deeper understanding of science concepts through a hands-on approach that identifies and dispels student misconceptions and expands student understanding and knowledge.

In addition, this field-tested and standards-based volume is ideal for university-level methodology courses in science education.
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Climate Change From Pole to Pole: Biology Investigations offers timely, relevant, biology-based case studies and background information on how to teach the science of climate change. The six painstakingly researched and field-tested activities, which build on four content chapters, give students the opportunity to solve real-life scientific problems using guiding questions, graphs and data tables, short reading assignments, and independent research.

This volume provides an authentic and rigorous way to engage students in science and environmental issues—scientific methods, evidence, climate, and biological effects of climate change—and is a unique and essential resource for your high school or college-level classroom.
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Teaching evolution is part of the core biology curriculum, and this new resource provides a teacher-ready summary of the scientific, legal, and ethical talking points for discussion of the topic. Compiled by NSTA with input from the National Center for Science Education, the NSTA Tool Kit for Teaching Evolution pulls together historical facts, scientific data, legal precedent, and other invaluable information for answering the all-too-common question of “Why teach evolution?” Biology and life science teachers will appreciate this resource, complete with classroom activities, for its ability to help you cover a relevant issue with depth and pedagogical support.
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*Available late fall 2008*

Are you properly evaluating the results of the tests you give to students? Can you explain the difference between classroom assessment and standardized assessment? Are you on solid ground with your grading system? Demystify—and even use—statistics to answer these important questions and more in this clear, easy-to-use text for preservice and classroom science teachers and methods professors.

The text’s practical approach helps teachers understand how to interpret student assessments statistically and how to measure and explain the validity and reliability of those assessments. Included are a global history of testing to its present state and valuable instructions for using graphing calculators for easy computing. This nonthreatening framework for measuring and interpreting assessment results is a must-have for your professional development library.
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The Story of Science Classroom Companion is a boon for teachers who choose master storyteller Joy Hakim’s Einstein Adds a New Dimensionas a primary or supplemental physics text. Hakim’s newest title in The Story of Science series brings to life the history of Albert Einstein and his fellow scientists as they lay the groundwork for concepts of particle physics and quantum mechanics. The Classroom Companion, which includes editions for both teachers and students, follows Hakim’s text chapter by chapter and provides teaching tips, lists of key vocabulary words, activities, writing prompts, additional online and print resources, and more. Free to NSTA members, this easily downloaded e-book will help classroom teachers and parents of homeschoolers use Hakim’s outstanding Einstein Adds a New Dimension to integrate science process with science literacy.
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“Almost all careers in the 21st century require a working knowledge of science and mathematics,” says Steve Metz, The Science Teacher field editor, in his introduction to All in a Day’s Work, 2nd edition. “The pending retirement of 78 millions baby boomers can only add to the need for science and mathematics training, as companies begin recruiting replacement workers in science fields, sometimes—believe it or not—as early as middle school!”

This expanded second edition will help you give students an exciting look at the vast array of jobs built on a foundation of science, including:

• the expected—high school science teacher, microbiologist, and radiation therapist,
• the unexpected—bomb investigator, space architect, and musical acoustics scientist, the adventurous—astronaut, deep-cave explorer, and dinosaur paleontologist, and
• the offbeat— shark advocate, roller coaster designer, and oyster wrangler

All in a Day’s Work, 2nd edition is a compendium of 49 of the popular “Career of the Month” columns from the NSTA high school journal The Science Teacher. Each column profiles a person in a science-related job and can be reproduced and shared with your high school students as they make career and education plans. Each profile includes suggestions about how to find additional career information, including links to websites and relevant professional organizations and interest groups.


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If you’re teaching an introductory science education course in a college or university, Readings in Science Methods, K–8, with its blend of theory, research, and examples of best practices, can serve as your only text, your primary text, or a supplemental text. If you’re a preservice teacher, you’ll want a copy for its insights into how you can effectively teach science. If you’re a practicing teacher, this book will refresh what you already know—and could lead you into new and fruitful approaches. And if you’re an administrator, this is the perfect professional development tool as a reference for your staff.

The book is a generously sized compendium of articles drawn from NSTA’s middle and elementary level journals, Science Scope and Science and Children. Editor Eric Brunsell teaches his methods courses using only the articles—the “voice of the classroom teacher,” he says. Brunsell has chosen the best journal articles, tested each in the classroom, and organized them into seven sections—each supplemented with its own insightful introduction and “action steps.”

• The Nature of Science and Science Inquiry

• Teaching Science

• Science for All

• Science-Teaching Toolbox

• Teaching Life and Environmental Science

• Teaching Physical Science

• Teaching Earth and Space Science
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The National Science Foundation-funded research projects described here show the strong link between assessment and improved student learning; the essays invite science teachers to reflect on their practices and priorities and to consider a variety of productive assessment strategies and frameworks. The central ideas around which the chapters are based—and which provide compelling data to fuel conversations about assessment purposes and opportunities—include the:

• Roles of assessment in teaching and learning

• Characteristics of meaningful assessment items

• Need for research to validate assessment practices

• Significance of assessing both student knowledge and their misconceptions

• Value of assessing students’ ability to apply their knowledge

• Importance of assessment-focused professional development

In addressing assessment as a central element of teaching practice, Assessing Science Learning explores the various forms assessment can take, including student journal entries, feedback on lab reports, observations of students engaged in activities, whole-class discussion, and large annual tests.
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Behind the stereotype of girls’ not doing well in science are some reasons, mostly based on one fact: They are often—and most often inadvertently—treated differently in the classroom. The authors of Girls in Science engaged in years of working under a grant funded by the National Science Foundation on this all-too-real problem of gender-equitable science teaching. What they found through working with students, teachers, and scientists— the three elements of the Triad community in which their research started—can change the way you teach and level the playing field of science education for girls.

The Triad refers also to the Student Goals, the Teaching Goals, and the Science Goals – there are five in each area—that lie at the heart of the book. Each of the 15 goals is supported by an essay, strategies, and brief vignettes that will help teachers and students reach the goal. The vignettes, written by teachers and scientists involved in the project, illustrate the strategies. They illuminate problems and provoke the reader to find remedies through the use of reflection questions and links to similar vignettes. For the Student Goal of “Confidence to Explore,” for instance, one of the three strategies is “Knowing that I learn when I make mistakes.” The five vignettes supporting the strategies include “After the Initial Eewww,” “No Longer the Same,” and “No Step-by-Step Instructions.”

Girls in Science is valuable for more than issues of gender equity. As their work progressed, the authors realized what they were learning could be adapted to help with equitable teaching for other groups of students; special-needs students, English language learners, and ethnic and racial minorities, for example.


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Taking science education beyond the classroom provides learning opportunities and experiences for students that just aren’t available within school walls, and Science Beyond the Classroom has a wealth of ideas on how to do it successfully. These carefully selected articles from the NSTA journals Science Scope and Science and Children were gathered into a compendium because of the value of informal science education in providing access to those experiences and in tapping into student interests.

Science Beyond the Classroom provides an overview of information and ideas—many of them include step-by-step, teacher-tested instructions and guidelines—that can be easily modified and adapted by teachers and others—scout leaders, club sponsors, parents, and home schoolers among them—who want to nurture enthusiasm for science. An introduc¬tion providing background and ideas for using the articles and a list of additional articles and web sites leads each of the five sections:

• Extending Science Learning Beyond the Curriculum: Projects and Challenges

• Extending Science Learning Beyond the School Building Walls: Using Local Sites

• Extending Science Learning Beyond the School Day: Clubs, Camps and Science Expositions

• Extending Science Learning to the Family: Take-Home Projects and Family Science Events

• Extending Science Learning to Informal Institutions: Museums, Zoos, and Other Field Trips

With its potential for engaging student interest, this book aims also at encouraging more students to enter academic fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
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A classic resource for teachers is now back in an updated edition! Using an inductive and experimental approach, Animal Coloration aims to increase students’ awareness of the ways wild organisms are adapted to their environments. Even though the activities suggest a specific teaching procedure, each activity is also intended to be an investigation by the students and an opportunity for them to make and test hypotheses based on their observations. Through these activities, students will begin to appreciate how scientific knowledge and understanding are attained.

Each of the activities provides an opportunity to incorporate National Science Education Content Standards, including science and inquiry, life science, and history and nature of science. Also new to this revision is a table summarizing each activity with learning outcomes and relevant content standards.

Originally published in 1966 by the Regents of the University of California (UC), Animal Coloration is the result of over five years of field-testing and experimentation by the Elementary School Science Project at UC Berkeley, funded by the National Science Foundation. This book was difficult to find for far too long (worn copies are a cherished part of many teachers’ libraries), so NSTA Press is especially proud to bring the book to a new generation of teachers and to update the work for its long-time admirers.
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What causes condensation? Does temperature affect how well a balloon will fly? How do tiny bugs get into oatmeal? Through 15 mystery stories, this book memorably illustrates science concepts for students and reinforces the value of learning science through inquiry. Each mystery presents opportunities for students to create questions, form hypotheses, test their ideas, and come up with explanations. Focused on concepts such as periodic motion, thermodynamics, temperature and energy, and sound, these mysteries draw students into the stories by grounding them in experiences students are familiar with, providing them with a foundation for classroom discussion and inquiry.

The story format is used because it is one of the most effective ways to engage students’ attention right from the start. Each chapter includes a list of science concepts explored, targeted strategies for using the stories with children in grades K–4 and with older students in grades 5–8, and a key matching story concepts with corresponding standards in the NSES.


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Because you demanded it! Since publication of Volume 1 of this series, thousands of teachers are using these innovative classroom tools to improve student learning in science. Following in the footsteps of earlier volumes in the Uncovering Student Ideas in Science series, this all-new book provides short, easy-to-administer probes that determine what misconceptions students bring to the classroom about the nature of science and about physical, life, Earth, and space sciences. This new volume in our bestselling series provides more topic areas for classroom use as well as guidance on how teachers can use the probes for their own learning.

As outlined in previous volumes, teachers—like their students—can have misconceptions that come to the fore when administering the probes. Volume 3 provides 10 detailed suggestions for teachers on how to use the probes to uncover, accurately assess, and correct their own preconceptions as well as their students’ (e.g., do the probes yourself, examine student responses with other teachers, embed the probes into existing professional development programs, select specific areas to focus on, examine student thinking across grade spans, categorize ideas, and crunch data to create classroom profiles).

Volume 3 offers five life science probes, seven Earth and space science probes, ten physical science probes, and three nature of science probes. This volume is an invaluable resource for classroom teachers, preservice teachers, professional developers, and college science and preservice faculty.


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Elementary teachers know that learning science involves both the process of thinking and the ability to communicate those thoughts. One of the most effective ways of demonstrating this is through the use of student science notebooks. The earlier students learn to keep records, the better they will be prepared to make this a natural part of their science activities.

Classroom teachers who want to begin using or who are currently including science notebooks as part of their instruction will find that Using Science Notebooks in Elementary Classrooms is a “must-have” resource for the development of scientific inquiry, literacy, and reasoning skills. This book makes the case for using science notebooks strategically—promoting hands-on observing, recording, and reflecting—and demonstrates how best to do so.

Connecting language arts to science through expository writing, the book presents proven techniques such as scaffolds, sentence starters, discussion starters, and other writing prompts to encourage students to build on current knowledge. Every step of the process is examined: introducing notebook writing to the class, creating questions to explore, making predictions, recording observations, making and defending claims, and using the notebooks to provide targeted student feedback. Also included are chapters on the specialized needs of English language learners, offering specific strategies to increase proficiency and fluency in both science and language.


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