Ann Rivet

Creating Hybrid Spaces for Engaging School Science Among Urban Middle School Girls

The middle grades are a crucial time for girls in making decisions about how or if they want to follow science trajectories. In this article, the authors report on how urban middle school girls enact meaningful strategies of engagement in science class in their efforts to merge their social worlds with the worlds of school science and on the unsanctioned resources and identities they take up to do so. The authors argue that such merging science practices are generative both in terms of how they develop over time and in how they impact the science learning community of practice. They discuss the implications these findings have for current policy and practice surrounding gender equity in science education.

Using analogical mapping to assess the affordances of scale models used in earth and environmental science education

Physical analog models are a common pedagogical device in Earth and Environmental Science education for helping students bridge the vast scale difference between the Earth and the classroom. Gentners structural framework for analogical reasoning has been used to map the correspondences and non-correspondences between two widely-used analog models and the relevant portions of the Earth System. A classroom model of convection in an aquarium has important correspondences to the atmospheric Hadley cell at the levels of attributes, simple relations, higher order relations and systematicity. A volcano eruption model lacks the relations among lava flow temperature, viscosity, and distance that result in construction of the distinctive conical shape of real volcanoes. Analogical mappings of classroom models can be used to guide the design of instruction and assessment so as to increase the chances that students will understand the Earth system at the level of higherorder relations rather than superficial attributes.

Teaching Methods For Earth Science

The Earth and environmental challenges facing our global society in the twenty-first century require robust understandings of the complexities of the ever-changing Earth system. Therefore it is critically important for Earth Science to be a central part of the secondary school science curriculum for all students, regardless of location or status. In some ways Earth Science may be considered the easiest of the science disciplines for students to learn about.

Content-Driven Literacy: One Approach to Urban Secondary Teacher Education

In an attempt to address perceived shortcomings in traditional content-area literacy preparation, an interdisciplinary group of teacher education faculty developed an approach called “content-driven literacy” (CDL), which was applied to the design of courses to prepare preservice secondary science and social studies teachers. This article describes the development and implementation of the CDL course work and its five elements: reading and writing embedded in subject matter, explicit instruction, planning and modification of literacy instruction, research-based instruction, and the use of diverse content-area texts. The types of knowledge the preservice teacher participants gained from this approach and implications for secondary content instruction are discussed.