We've been hearing more and more about FOSS being used in summer schools around the country. In this issue we highlight two programs in California taking different approaches to bringing active learning to summer school students.
In the mid 1990s, NSF was mounting a series of major science education reform efforts. The architects of these programs were sincere; the goals were laudable, and the enthusiasm on the ground was palpable. But ultimately, the envisioned reforms were not realized.
More and more we hear requests for FOSS materials in other languages.
Recently I walked into Ryan Kollar's sixth-grade science class and noticed something strange. It wasn't the fact that the kids were basically operating the class through concentrated student-led group discussion. It wasn't the weird diagrams drawn on the board. Nope, it wasn't even the cockroaches perched on the walls of the aquarium in his classroom. The strange thing I saw was Kollar smiling.
Formative assessment has become a bit of a buzzword, and like other educational terms it can come to mean many different things.
Has a student of yours ever asked a question so big and so important that everything else had to stop until the answer could be found?