This volume presents current thoughts, research, and findings that were presented at a summit focusing on energy as a cross-cutting concept in education, involving scientists, science education researchers and science educators from across the world. The chapters cover four key questions: what should students know about energy, what can we learn from research on teaching and learning about energy, what are the challenges we are currently facing in teaching students this knowledge, and what needs be done to meet these challenges in the future?
Energy is one of the most important ideas in all of science and it is useful for predicting and explaining phenomena within every scientific discipline. The challenge for teachers is to respond to recent policies requiring them to teach not only about energy as a disciplinary idea but also about energy as an analytical framework that cuts across disciplines. Teaching energy as a crosscutting concept can equip a new generation of scientists and engineers to think about the latest cross-disciplinary problems, and it requires a new approach to the idea of energy.
This book examines the latest challenges of K-12 teaching about energy, including how a comprehensive understanding of energy can be developed. The authors present innovative strategies for learning and teaching about energy, revealing overlapping and diverging views from scientists and science educators. The reader will discover investigations into the learning progression of energy, how understanding of energy can be examined, and proposals for future directions for work in this arena.
Science teachers and educators, science education researchers and scientists themselves will all find the discussions and research presented in this book engaging and informative.

By providing a variety of strategies, scenarios, examples of student writing, classroom video clips from across all science content areas, rubrics, and guidelines for designing assessment items, "Supporting Grade 5-8 Students in Constructing Explanations in Science: The Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning Framework for Talk and Writing" ""provides teachers with the tools to successfully incorporate scientific explanation in their own classrooms. Grounded in NSF-funded research, this book/DVD supports middle grades science teachers with an instructional framework that breaks down the complex practice of scientific explanation into four components-claim, evidence, reasoning, and rebuttal-and providesconcrete examples of what this scientific inquiry practice looks like when it is successfully implemented in real classrooms. Over the last nine years that McNeill and Krajcik have developed, field tested, and refined this instructional model, they found that incorporating this framework for scientific explanation into curriculum materials, teacher instructional strategies, and assessments enhances students conceptual understanding and improves their ability to think and communicate more scientifically by carefully analyzing evidence and backing up their claims. Facilitator's Guide Package for Science Coaches and Staff Development TrainersTake the guess work out of leading professional development and book studies with the "Facilitator's Guide and Book Package. "To order, use Special ISBN: 9780132549400 and contact your sales representative at www.allynbaconmerrill.com/findmyrep. What Educators Are Saying"I would encourage others to use it as a resource for a professional learning community or department discussion group and the like... absolutely I would recommend it - why? it is simply good for our students' developing understanding of science..." "- Pamela M. Pelletier, Senior Program Director, Science K-12, Boston Public Schools, Boston, Massachusetts" " This book] can easily be used to guide middle school teams to collaboratively work together to ask higher order thinking questions in any core content area. This type of questioning leads to great classroom discourse, therefore engaging students in using claims, evidence, and reasoning.""- Kendra Walters Durham, Science Teacher, Wester Middle School, Frisco, Texas Take a Look Inside

• Integrates video clips from a range of grade levels and contexts (e.g., urban and suburban) throughout the text to demonstrate the use of the scientific explanation framework in actual classrooms (Chapters 2, 4 and 7)
• Provides examples of student work throughout the book to demonstrate student accomplishment and to illustrate the most common student difficulties and strategies for supporting those challenges. (Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 6)
• Incorporates learning strategies that can support all students, including English Language Learners and students with special needs, and helps teachers with ideas on how to modify instruction to best meet the needs of their students.
• Presents rubrics for evaluating students' written explanations and sample assessment tasks with model teacher critiques of student explanations based on developed rubric.

This volume presents current thoughts, research, and findings that were presented at a summit focusing on energy as a cross-cutting concept in education, involving scientists, science education researchers and science educators from across the world. The chapters cover four key questions: what should students know about energy, what can we learn from research on teaching and learning about energy, what are the challenges we are currently facing in teaching students this knowledge, and what needs be done to meet these challenges in the future? Energy is one of the most important ideas in all of science and it is useful for predicting and explaining phenomena within every scientific discipline. The challenge for teachers is to respond to recent policies requiring them to teach not only about energy as a disciplinary idea but also about energy as an analytical framework that cuts across disciplines. Teaching energy as a crosscutting concept can equip a new generation of scientists and engineers to think about the latest cross-disciplinary problems, and it requires a new approach to the idea of energy. This book examines the latest challenges of K-12 teaching about energy, including how a comprehensive understanding of energy can be developed. The authors present innovative strategies for learning and teaching about energy, revealing overlapping and diverging views from scientists and science educators. The reader will discover investigations into the learning progression of energy, how understanding of energy can be examined, and proposals for future directions for work in this arena. Science teachers and educators, science education researchers and scientists themselves will all find the discussions and research presented in this book engaging and informative.

Education has traditionally studied the world by bringing it into the classroom. This can result in situated learning that appears to students to have no relevance outside the classroom. Students acquire inert, decontextualized knowledge that they cannot apply to real problems. The obvious solution to this shortcoming is to reverse the situation and bring the classroom to the phenomena: to learn in a rich, real-world context. The problem with the real world is that it is complex and filled with interactions that are hard to sort out. The editors and authors believe that the right tools might help students with this sorting process and result in learning in rich contexts. This book is an account of a series of experiments designed to explore the validity of this insight.

An innovative, internationally developed system to help advance science learning and instruction for high school students This book tells the story of a $3.6 million research project funded by the National Science Foundation aimed at increasing scientific literacy and addressing global concerns of declining science engagement. Studying dozens of classrooms across the United States and Finland, this international team combines large-scale studies with intensive interviews from teachers and students to examine how to transform science education. Written for teachers, parents, policymakers, and researchers, this book offers solutions for matching science learning and instruction with newly recommended twenty-first-century standards. Included are science activities that engage and inspire students; sample lesson plans; and approaches for measuring science engagement and encouragement of three-dimensional learning.