Audrey C. Rule

Effects of Practical Life Materials on Kindergartners' Fine Motor Skills

A pretest-posttest control group design was used to measure the effect of practical life materials on public school kindergarten childrens fine motor skill development over a 6-month period. The dependent measure was a penny posting test. More than 50 different sets of activities were provided to the experimental group (n = 101). Teachers coached students in following specific steps to use tweezers, tongs, and spoons to manipulate a variety of objects. Students then employed the materials during center time in their classrooms. Although experimental and control group teachers reported equal amounts of fine motor activity in their classrooms, significant interaction effects were found indicating the experimental group outperformed the control on the posttest measure. An overall effect size of 0.74 indicates that the type of fine motor activity is important in childrens development.

Elementary Students' Ideas Concerning Fossil Fuel Energy

Forty-two academically gifted and thirty-two average-achieving elementary students in grades one through six were interviewed to determine ideas concerning fossil fuel energy. There were no significant differences between the responses of the two populations. Major categories of misconceptions encountered during interviews included misconceptions about: configuration or distribution of petroleum reservoirs, gasoline manufacture and storage, the origin of petroleum, the importance of petroleum in our society, petroleum prospecting and recovery; and the nature of coal and natural gas. Misconceptions about fossil fuels arise for a variety of reasons. Students sometimes misunderstand scenes from movies, televisions shows or cartoons, make incorrect analogies with more familiar experiences, misinterpret diagrams in printed materials, misconstrue the meanings of symbols, or confuse similar-sounding terms or words with more than one meaning. Sixty-seven preservice teachers responding to a ten-question survey to investigate the persistence of fossil fuel misconceptions into adulthood revealed many held the same ideas as elementary students, confirming the importance of addressing younger students ideas during instruction.

Second Graders Learn Animal Adaptations through Form and Function Analogy Object Boxes.

This study examined the use of form and function analogy object boxes to teach second graders (n = 21) animal adaptations. The study used a pretest–posttest design to examine animal adaptation content learned through focused analogy activities as compared with reading and Internet searches for information about adaptations of animals followed by making an informative puppet play. Students participated in six week‐long lesson sets, each addressing adaptations of two animals, which alternated between the two conditions. In the analogy condition, students matched cards explaining form and function analogies of animal body parts or homes to analogous manufactured items. They mapped analogies, thought of alternate manufactured items, and created new analogies. Students scored similarly on material to be taught through both conditions on the pretest, but made significantly higher posttest mean scores (76.1% analogy versus 57.2% traditional condition) with large effect size (partial η2 = 0.58) on animal adaptation content learned through the analogy activities. This study shows the usefulness of form and function analogies in teaching product innovations to second‐grade students, indicating that early childhood students are able to successfully engage in sophisticated analogy activities. Efficacy of the analogy activities was related to objects that focused attention, motivated, and gave concrete representations of concepts; to cards and graphic organizers for organization, connections, and memory; and to complex thinking activities that challenged students and promoted peer interaction.

Preservice Elementary Teachers' Ideas about Clays

Clays are important industrial materials used for many purposes because of their plasticity and other unique properties. Clay science concepts can be used to effectively support learning of foundational science principles in elementary grades. Because preparation to teach science affects the quality of a teachers instruction, this study examined preservice elementary teachers ideas about clays before and after lessons on clay science that incorporated instructional approaches supported by the literature. These teaching methods included viewing a slide show of clay mineral structures and scanning electron photographs of clay minerals, along with explanations of the origin of clay minerals and their properties; matching clay products to cards that described the properties of clays employed by the products; and playing a game in which participants identified clay products in different rooms of a house. Before instruction, most participants were familiar only with ceramics as clay products, with less than half aware that clays were naturally occurring materials. Pre-instructional concepts of the geologic origin of clay were similar for preservice teachers who “guessed” or “reasoned” answers compared to those who said they had learned the information previously. Participants exhibited significant gains in knowledge of clay properties for use in various products from pretest to posttest.

High School Students' Mnemonic Devices for Mohs Hardness Scale

Eleventh and twelfth grade students in five earth science classes made charts of mineral facts, mnemonic cartoon drawings, and corresponding poetry couplets for minerals on the Mohs scale of hardness. Students products revealed they enjoyed the activity and learned many mineral concepts. The activity gave the instructor the opportunity to identify and correct several student misunderstandings. Many students displayed creativity in organizing their poems and drawings by a theme, using hardness numbers to represent two things in depictions, using homonyms, and incorporating humor in the cartoons. A rubric for evaluating student work addressed six aspects: correct mineral facts, mechanics of work, poem message, rhythm/rhyme, images, and creativity.

Seventh Grade Students Learn about the Use of Clays in Everyday Products

Clay minerals are widespread at the Earths surface, compose a large percentage of sedimentary rocks, and are important components of many common products including brick and tile, tableware, sanitaryware, paper, paints, plastics, rubber, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals. Knowledge of the role of clay industrial products supports attainment of science knowledge goals in middle school (Rule and Guggenheim, 2007). This simple pretest-intervention posttest study presents effective examples of clay science activities for middle school students that highlight the multiple uses of clay minerals in common products and support learning of other geoscience concepts such as crystal structure and resulting physical properties of materials. A class of twenty-one students at an urban middle school in central New York State participated in the study. Student scores on the pretest averaged 52% correct compared to 83% correct on the posttest taken seven weeks later, indicating the efficacy of the activities in teaching clay science concepts. A written survey three weeks after lessons had concluded showed students learned much about clay properties and clay use in everyday objects along with enjoying group work and the hands-on materials with clues.

Fourth Grade Students Explore Natural Sand Towers through Evidence, Models, and Explanations

This article describes a mathematics-science integrated lesson for fourth grade students involving inquiry into how natural sand towers form. Natural sand towers are finger-sized pillars of sand that form on beaches underneath frost-heaved slabs of frozen sand during a thaw. As the sand-ice slabs melt, water drips from the lowest points of the undersides, depositing a pillar of sand on the floor of the “cave” below. Seventeen fourth grade students participated in the lesson by observing photographs of the phenomena, making hypotheses, investigating a model, and producing sand towers by dribbling wet sand of two types. Mean, median and mode were determined for height measurements of the sand towers. Students showed significant gains from pretest to posttest in understanding the scientific method and calculation of different types of averages.