To Students

As you can see, this is an interactive e-book, so you won’t find any printed pages. More important, this book has a lot more than just words and pictures. On most pages you’ll find multimedia resources, and virtually every page has questions that you should try to answer before you continue on. You’ll also find many little extras, such as boxes that you can click to learn more, and glossary terms that appear when you scroll over words. We hope you’ll find it a good way to learn.

To Teachers

This web-based title, offered for free, represents a digital textbook intended primarily for Middle School Earth and Space Science, typically taught in 8^thgrade, though it may also be of value to many high school classes. Over time, we hope to enhance this project with additional video, interaction, and assessment, and then develop similar drafts for Physical Science (typically 6^thgrade) and Life Science (typically 7^thgrade) courses. The eventual goal is to create a complete, coherent, middle school science curriculum, digitally distributed at low or no cost for teachers and students around the world.

Two notes of particular importance as you use this draft, online textbook:

• You will see that this project has many embedded assessments, both formative and summative. Some of them (such as multiple choice quizzes) are even graded automatically. Unfortunately, we do not currently have a way to provide you with the results of these assessments. Therefore, you will need to find your own way to review student work, such as by having students turn in their work with pencil and paper or through email.
• Somewhat similarly, you will see that we also have extensive “Teacher Notes” embedded throughout the text (and plan to add more in the future), and these are can in principle be read by students as well as teachers. This is obviously not ideal, but we do not currently have the resources necessary to make a separate teacher edition of this project. Fortunately, early feedback indicates that most students won’t bother to open these notes, and those who do will tend to learn more, not less.

Please see our Teaching Guide for additional tips on using this online textbook and for correlations between this book and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

About this Project — A Note From the Lead Author

Welcome, and thank you for taking the time to take a look at this draft, in-progress, online textbook. To help you understand what this project is about, I will briefly explain the motivations and rationale behind it.

The motivation is simple: I believe that middle school is the weakest link in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education, both in the United States and around the world. I further believe that my career as a scientist and educator has put me in a position to try to help rectify this situation by improving upon existing middle school curriculum materials. I’ve decided to post the curriculum freely online so that cost will not be an impediment to its use. The draft online textbook you see here, made with the help of many friends and colleagues, represents the progress we’ve made to date.

For the rationale, let’s start by looking at what I believe are the three major reasons that middle school is currently the weak link in STEM education:

1. Middle school is where we have the most work to do in keeping students engaged in science (and STEM more generally). This conclusion is not only well-supported by a large body of educational research, but it is also fairly obvious: As most teachers and parents know, elementary school children almost universally love science, while the attitudes of high school students toward science span a much wider range. Clearly, then, middle school is the place where we are losing many of our students in terms of continued love of science. This loss is damaging both to the students, who lose out on great opportunities for STEM careers, and to society, because we need a scientifically literate citizenry to make intelligent decisions in the modern world (see the H.G. Wells quote in the Dedication above).
2. Developmentally, middle school presents a particular challenge for science/STEM education, because middle school is the time during which we need students to make a transition from the more concrete thinking of elementary school to the more critical and abstract thinking needed for high school and beyond. To elaborate a little further:
   • One of the major goals of science education (i.e., by the end of high school) is for students to understand how science actually works, and real science almost always proceeds as follows: Scientists first accumulate a set of concrete observations and measurements, and then learn to interpret them through the development of much more generalized — and hence abstract — scientific models and theories. Note that this procession from the concrete to the abstract also matches how humans learn; that is, we all learn best by starting with concrete examples and then proceeding to generalization and abstraction.
   • Human cognitive development also proceeds from concrete to abstract thinking (as demonstrated by psychologist Jean Piaget in the 1950s). During elementary school, most children are at a developmental stage where they can think concretely but not yet abstractly. This begins to change only as children reach middle school. In other words, most students are developing their adult-like capabilities for critical and abstract thinking during the time they are in middle school.
   • Middle school therefore represents the time during which we must help students make the transition from seeing science simply as a set of concrete observations and demonstrations (note that these can be very fun, which may explain elementary students’ near-universal love of science) to learning how to understand and think critically about more abstract scientific models and theories.
3. The above points mean that middle school STEM curriculum materials must be of particularly high quality to keep students engaged while helping them make the concrete-to-abstract transition. Unfortunately, while I have by no means undertaken a comprehensive review of materials available for the middle school market, I have seen enough to know that the general quality of available materials is far from ideal. For example:
   • The textbooks and curricula available from most educational publishers lack the cohesiveness necessary to build learning in an appropriately scaffolded and efficient way. In particular, most of them read as though they were written by committee (often because they were) or to hit a set of bullet points for some particular school board or some particular standardized test. Science can be difficult to learn even when presented clearly, so the scattered approach of many existing materials is a major failing.
   • Even when the textbooks and curricula have some cohesion, they often fail to meet well-documented principles of pedagogy. For example, while the fact that we all learn best by starting concrete and then generalizing to the abstract (as above) is well-known, I frequently see middle school materials that go in the reverse direction. Note: For those interested in reading further about this, I’ve written a book called On Teaching Science that summarizes what I believe are the most important pedagogical principles to follow.
   • Many of the middle school materials I’ve reviewed are riddled with scientific errors, suggesting that they were either written or edited by people who do not understand the science well themselves, and who did not bother to consult (or listen to) expert reviewers.

Of course, the above list of problems with middle school STEM education also explains why I believe there is a tremendous opportunity to improve it. Perhaps I am naïve, but I believe there is a simple recipe that would do much better. Here is the recipe, along with notes on how we are applying it in the development of this online textbook:

• The curriculum must be clear and coherent, both within each grade level and across grade levels. To accomplish this, the curriculum development needs to be led by a single author who has both the necessary pedagogical understanding and the necessary scientific expertise across all of middle school science (i.e., physical science, life science, and Earth/space science) to provide an efficient, scaffolded path to building student understanding.
  ⇒For this project, I am personally serving as the single lead author.
• The curriculum must be teacher-driven, meaning that it should be built under the assumption that teachers will be managing a classroom and guiding students in learning collaboratively. Of course, any curriculum — and especially a digital curriculum — can also be used for individual learning or home schooling. But I believe that one of the major failings of most digital curricula to date is that they have attempted to be too individualized while neglecting the critical role of teachers. Teachers are trained to be classroom managers and facilitators of learning, and teachers who do a good job of this produce the best results in their students.
  ⇒As you browse this online textbook, you will see that the material is indeed designed to be teacher-driven, with teachers setting the pace and leading activities and discussions.
• The curriculum must be scientifically accurate and engaging, and must build conceptual understanding in an appropriately scaffolded way.
  ⇒ We are ensuring scientific accuracy at every stage of the process, both by carefully checking all facts/concepts for ourselves and by consulting expert colleagues where needed. We are making it engaging with activity and interaction that promotes self-discovery by students, rather than simply telling students the answers. Most important, we have put an enormous amount of thought into ensuring that the curriculum follows a logical pathway that gradually builds student understanding.
• The curriculum must be capable of serving the needs of students with a wide range of prior science knowledge. Compared to high school, where students are typically tracked according to prior performance, middle school classes tend to have a much wider student range. Some students may have learned little if any science in the past, while others may already seem well on their way to Ph.Ds. This range presents a great challenge for teachers, and demands that the curriculum provide both the background needed to bring the weaker students up to speed and the more advanced material that will engage strong students.
  ⇒You will see how we try to always start from the beginning with any concept, so that we can help the weakest students catch up, while also offering digital features that will allow strong students to go far beyond the basics of middle school science.
• Teachers also have a wide range of scientific backgrounds; some teachers have advanced degrees in the subjects they are teaching, while others are being asked to teach a science that they may never have studied for themselves. The curriculum must therefore provide teachers with the background and support they will need both to help their students generally and to answer the wide range of questions likely to come from their wide range of students.
  ⇒This draft online textbook already has extensive notes to teachers designed to meet this need, and in the future we hope to add many more teacher resources, including videos with additional scientific background and videos demonstrating how to conduct some of the more complex classroom activities.
• The curriculum must meet the practical concerns of teachers and administrators in ensuring that their students will meet local, state, or national standards. Although there is no universally agreed upon set of middle school standards, we believe that the vast majority of such standards can still be met by a sufficiently well-developed curriculum.
  ⇒ We are not directly following any particular set of standards in developing this project, but we are ensuring that our curriculum will meet all of the middle school standards that are part of the recently-developed Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS). Because these standards are generally set higher than most other sets of middle school standards, we believe that in meeting the NGSS, we will also meet the needs of most schools that follow a different set of standards.

I hope these notes have helped clarify the goals of this project. Please keep in mind that this is a work in progress, and each time you check back you are likely to find changes, both within chapters already posted and in the addition of newly posted chapters.

Finally, I’ll remind you again that this project is an experiment, and one into which we are pouring substantial time and money. We therefore need to hear from you about how it is working and whether it is worth continued effort. Please email me (jeff@bigkidscience.com) with any and all comments.

Thank you,

Jeff Bennett
(lead author)

Back Next