Attitude Toward Science, Scientists
Prajukti Bhattacharyya, University of Wisconsin - Whitewater Course: Introduction to Earth Science 25-32 students Students' negative attitudes toward science can be a surprisingly powerful barrier to learning. ...

Hypothesis Testing
Elizabeth Wright, School of the Art Institute of Chicago Course: Earth Science 20 students The Activity We discuss the scientific method. Then I present an image entitled "The World of the Ancient ...

Reflection on the process of science & geoscience
This is an activity for early in the semester that asks student to reflect on their understanding of the process of science, participate in an activity about the process of science, and then re-reflect on their ...

Exploring undergraduate research
Students attend a poster session where undergraduates are presenting their research. They are required to talk to four students; they submit the questions they asked and the responses they received, as well as ...

Organizing Scientific Writing
I give writing assignments along with some explicit instructions about how to organize their writing. Drafts are reviewed by peers and the instructor.

Observations vs. Explanations
In small-group and class discussions, students learn to separate scientific observations from explanations.

Earth Stories: Earth Science for Elementary Education Majors
This course is designed to help Elementary Education majors learn basic geological concepts. This is done in the context of the nature of science and basic scientific thinking skills.

An Interactive Study: Laws of Conservation of Mass and Definite Proportions
This activity seeks to have students model the process of science by recording quantitative and qualitative attributes of reactants and products in three separate experiments with the purpose of examining the relationship between the original reactant(s) to the final product(s). Students record the mass and volume of reactants and products and independently calculate mathematical relationships between the reactant(s) and product(s). They also record their observations of any physical changes that occur.

Rutherford's enlarged: A content-embedded activity to teach about nature of science
This activity can be used to help middle and secondary school students develop more informed understandings of some important aspects of nature of science in the context of teaching them about Rutherford's experiments and atomic structure.

6 classroom discussion starters to teach the process and nature of science
I have included slides here that were used to initiate a half dozen class discussions of about 10 students each. The topics were: Ownership and Sharing, Scientists as public figures, Intuition and pattern recognition vs. controlled experiments, Public engagement with vs. as scientists, Democratization of scientific information, and Data deluge (includes Understanding Sci flowcht).