Workshops: Search by Date
Math-infused Science: Part 4 Choosing the Most Appropriate Graph for Your Data
The final workshop in this series guides teachers through the technical steps of helping students create a graph that looks the way the student intends it to look. We will navigate the formulas, buttons, options, and functions of two common graphing programs to make visual displays of data that are both beautiful and informative. A […]
Using Games to Teach Complex Concepts
Excitement is easy to stir up when you frame something as a game and add a bit of competition to the process of thinking and learning. In this session, teachers will practice creating two different types of games that can be used to cover the content and apply skills. We will identify when a game […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 1 Building Curiosity
In this workshop, we will practice a repeatable structure for introducing a topic that will be studied through scientific exploration using a remote teaching and learning platform. We will help our students conduct a preliminary investigation at home developing interest in a particular phenomenon by generating data and making observations and hypotheses. We will then […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 2 Helping Students Write an Experimental Procedure
In this workshop, we will pick up where Part 1 of this series left off. We begin with a list of variables our students have identified as potentially impacting a particular phenomenon they have explored. Using a think-pair-share process, we will give students the structure needed to write steps for a scientific investigation using the […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 3 Guiding Students Through Data Analysis
Teachers will play the role of the students, collecting data in their own homes and pooling their observations and measurements in a spreadsheet shared by their lab partners. We will conduct data analysis within lab groups during the workshop to experience how this process can be performed using remote teaching and learning platforms. Peer critiques […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 4 Drawing Evidence-based Conclusions
This workshop will focus on the content and demands of the conclusion section of a lab report, with applications to data-based questions and internal assessments for IB students, and free response questions for AP students. The conclusions drawn from experimental data must be limited to the scope of the experiment, but it is also important […]
Student-designed Experiments: Part 5 Data-generating Activities for Labs, Demos, and Computation
Whether in the classroom or at home, how do we initiate the process of student-designed lab or field experiments? The first step is to help the students see potential research questions and the data in the world around them. In this 1.5-hour workshop, we engage in several demonstration activities to help teachers see sources for […]
Statistics for Teaching Science: Part 1 Measuring and Reporting Uncertainty
All measurements include some degree of uncertainty or error, but how it is reported is decided by the person collecting the data. Because analysis is dependent on the data collected, the method used to report error can substantially impact the strength of the claims made and conclusions drawn. In this workshop, we will explore five […]
Statistics for Teaching Science: Part 2 The Problem with Describing Data Using the Mean
Often by middle school and certainly by high school, students default to the mean as the best way to describe data without much consideration for how they might defend that choice. So, you might think, what’s the harm in that? Everyone knows what is meant by this descriptor, it is familiar and understandable, easy to […]
Statistics for Teaching Science: Part 3 Getting Comfortable with Variance, Standard Deviation, Standard Error of the Mean, and the 95% Confidence Interval
The variance, standard deviation, and standard error of the mean are excellent methods for describing data because they convey the variability of the observed data around the mean. Anyone teaching AP, IB, Pre-AP, Pre-IB, or college-bound science students will likely want to know how to calculate these values, what they indicate, and how to contextualize […]