Most college students struggle with the vocabulary of our disciplines. In their various electronic exchanges, they do not use a lot of multisyllabic, difficult-to-pronounce words. And virtually all college courses are vocabulary rich – unfamiliar words abound. Most students know that the new vocabulary in a course is important. They use flash cards and other methods to help them memorize the words and their meanings for their exams. Two days later, the words and their meanings are gone.

Word sort is a strategy that helps students learn and better remember new vocabulary. Students work in small groups, with each group given an envelope containing key terms on separate slips of paper. Students are instructed to discuss what they think the relationships among the words might be. The strategy was developed for use in science courses, where terms have more precise meanings and fit more readily into categories. Students do this initial sort before reading about the terms or hearing them defined and discussed in lecture. After exposure to the words in the text or lecture, students get back into their groups and re-sort the words, comparing their new arrangements with the ones they first constructed.

Lots of iterations of the basic strategy can be used. For example, individual students can be given the collection of terms and told to define and relate them after having done the reading as a homework assignment. Before turning their work in for some modest number of points, students might share with other students in a small group what they’ve done. Or the instructor might use a particularly good categorization in a final review of the material or position that chunk of content with what’s to be learned next.

As might be expected, some students (in this article it was a small group) object to the approach. These are the students who think that the instructor should just tell them the definitions and their relationships. Having to figure it out for themselves means that the students are doing the work the teacher should be doing. What these students fail to understand is that the process of discussing – saying the words aloud and using them in sentences – makes the words more familiar and therefore easier to remember. Exploring how the words relate to each other means that the students are building a framework that puts the words in context, also making the words easier to remember in both the short and long terms.

If students work with the terms and their relationships before being given their definitions and relationships, they are forced to draw on their prior knowledge and experience. Students discover that they often do know something about the terms and their relationships, and teachers need to include more activities in courses that challenge students to draw on their prior knowledge. Students do not arrive in college courses as blank slates – they have taken (in this case) science courses previously. That tasks like these challenge students is a good thing. Students benefit when they are put in situations where figuring out answers is up to them.

Reference:

Nixon, S. and Fishback, J. (2009). Enhancing comprehension and retention of vocabulary concepts through small-group discussion: Probing for connections among key terms. Journal of College Science Teaching, May/June, 18-21.

Inside the School welcomes your submission for consideration. Visit our submissions guidelines page for more information.

All in a Day’s Work, $15.95, is a short book that profiles 49 different careers in science. The book is divided into areas of interest such as The Adventurous life, Animal Kingdom, and Artistic Endeavors and the jobs profiled in each section will appeal to a wide number of students in class. Some of the profiles are what you’d expect: science teacher, oceanographer, and physician. Other profiles include deep-cave explorer, shark advocate, and roller coaster designer.

Each job profile is written from the job holder’s perspective and offers students insights into the field, how the person became interested in the field, the career path, and what students can do right now to explore the career. At the end of each job is a brief resume of the job holder’s education, a Web site for more information, and related jobs.

Sullivan did a nice job balancing the men and women in the book (29 men, 20 women), but some students might be intimidated by the level of education that each profiled person has. People with doctoral-level degrees dominate the book, with over half of the job profiles (56%). Those with Master’s degrees and Bachelor’s degrees are evenly split among the rest of the profiles, with only one job for those with only a high school diploma.

As a teacher, this book could be a good tool to connect student interests with science. Musicians will find jobs as a musical acoustics scientist and artists might see themselves as scientific illustrators or art conservationists. Athletes might connect with the deep-cave explorer or the sport biomechanist.

Science teachers who are looking for a guest speaker for a unit might want to consult this book as well. The individual professions list the professional Web site and related occupations, which would be helpful when looking for local experts to talk to the class.

This small book written in a friendly, useful way and would make a great addition to a science department’s professional library. Individual teachers who want to interest students in careers in the sciences will find a spot on their bookshelves for it, too.

Bottom line: It’s a bit pricey for a 140-page book, but the information in it is terrific for sparking student interest in science-related jobs.

The Big Picture site from The Boston Globe is a collection of photos that you wouldn’t see in a newspaper or magazine, but they’re fascinating and useful for teachers. One of those photo essays is about Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has built a 17-mile particle accelerator, the LHC, to test the origins of, well, everything. CERN ran some preliminary tests in August and has been chilling the tunnels (1.9 degrees above absolute zero) in preparation for the first beam to accelerate around the track on Sept. 10, 2009.
LHC will force two hadron beams, some of the smallest bits in the universe, to collide at high speeds. Scientists expect their experiments to support or disprove the Standard Model of particle physics and the Big Bang Theory.
From a non-scientific perspective, the photos are terrific. Colorful and geometric, the photos show the grand scale of the world’s largest scientific experiment. Since the photos are huge and detailed, expect the page to load very slowly.
The photo tour of the LHC includes:

• The insertion of liquid argon crystal into the ATLAS inner detector end cap
• A look over a worker’s shoulder and into the pixel detector
• The installation of the world’s largest silicon tracking detector
• An aerial view of the French and Swiss landscape in which shows the accelerator’s tunnels

According to the National Council of Teachers of Math, all students, k-12, need to make decisions about what units and methods are the best for measuring something. A unifying concept for high school science is the idea of change, constancy and measurement.

But when you talk to students about how small an atom really is or the breadth of the universe, they have a hard time visualizing just how small or large the scale really is.

Nikon has developed an interactive Website, the Universcale, which places light years and femtometers (a quadrillionth of a meter) into perspective. The site features a bar at the bottom of the screen that lists the units of measurement from the smallest to the greatest. Above the measurement bar are silhouettes that illustrate an object that is commonly measured with each unit. Objects line up from least to greatest, with invisible quarks at the small end, the great pyramids in the middle, and the vastness of outer space at the far end. Humans are included on the scale, as are rabbits, fleas, and dust mites.

At each measurement stop (picometers, nanometers, centimeters, meters, kilometers) the site offers an explanation of what the measurement term means and what it commonly measures. Measurements are listed in scientific notation and a grid displays the relative grandeur of each object.

Another great site, though much simpler in design is SensibleUnits.com. Type in any unit of measure and the site will offer equivalent measurements in relatively common objects. Two centimeters is the same as the length 2.5 grains of basmati rice, lined up end to end, or the width of two CD cases, stacked. Ninety-seven feet is the same as the span of 22 moose antlers. For numbers over 1,000, the site will translate the number into scientific notation, but it does not accept it for entries.

When used together, the Nikon site and the Sensible Units site reveal some interesting results. According to Nikon, the Great Pyramid of King Khufu is 147 meters tall, or 1.3 American football fields, according to Sensible Units. The 15-meter Tyrannosaurus is the equivalent of 2.5 stretched out human intestines or 7.6 Kobe Bryants.

Both sites could be used, separately or in conjunction, to make math and science measurements more accessible.