If you and your students can’t get enough of a good thing, Volume 2 of Uncovering Student Ideas in Physical Science is just what you need. The book offers 39 new formative assessment probes, this time with a focus on electric charge, electric current, and magnets and electromagnetism. It can help you do everything from demystify electromagnetic fields to explain the real reason balloons stick to the wall after you rub them on your hair. Like the other eight wildly popular books in the full series, Uncovering Student Ideas in Physical Science, Volume 2: • Provides a collection of engaging questions, or formative assessment probes. Each probe in this volume is designed to uncover what students know―or think they know―about electric or magnetic phenomena or identify misunderstandings they may develop during instruction. • Offers field-tested teacher materials that provide “best answers” along with distracters designed to reveal misconceptions that students commonly hold. • Is easy to use by time-starved teachers like you. The new probes are short, easy-to-administer activities that come ready to reproduce. In addition to explaining the science content, the teacher materials note links to national standards and suggest grade-appropriate ways to present material so students will learn it accurately. By helping you detect and then make sound instructional decisions to address students’ misconceptions, this new volume has the potential to transform your teaching.
Page Keeley is the senior science program director at the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance (MMSA). She directs projects in the areas of leadership, professional development, standards and research on learning, formative assessment, and mentoring and coaching, and consults with school districts and organizations nationally. She has been the principal investigator on three NSF-funded projects: the Northern New England Co-Mentoring Network, a school-based mentoring program that supported science and mathematics professional learning communities for middle and high school mentors and new teachers; Curriculum Topic Study- A Systematic Approach to Utilizing National Standards and Cognitive Research; and PRISMS- Phenomena and Representations for Instruction of Science in Middle School, a National Digital Library collection of Web resources aligned to standards and reviewed for instructional quality. In addition she is a co-PI on two statewide projects: Science Content, Conceptual Change, and Collaboration (SC4), a state MSP focused on conceptual change teaching in the physical sciences for K–8 teachers and a National SemiConductor Foundation grant on Linking Science, Inquiry, and Language Literacy (L-SILL). Keeley is the author of ten nationally published books, including four books in the Curriculum Topic Study series (Corwin Press), four volumes in the Uncovering Student Ideas in Science: 25 Formative Assessment Probes series (NSTA Press), Science Formative Assessment: 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning (Corwin and NSTA Press), and Mathematics Formative Assessment: 50 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning (in press). Keeley taught middle and high school science for 15 years. At that time she was an active teacher leader at the state and national level. She received the Presidential Award for excellence in Secondary Science Teaching in 1992 and the Milken National Educator Award in 1993. She has served as an adjunct instructor at the University of Maine, is a Cohort 1 Fellow in the National Academy for Science and Mathematics Education Leadership, served as a science literacy leader for the AAAS/Project 2061 Professional Development Program, and has served on several national advisory boards. She is a frequent speaker at national conferences and served as the 63rd President of the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) for the 2008-09 term.
