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Podcast Nevertheless explore the need for string role models in STEM

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BECKY: One person that really inspired me when I was a kid was my Aunt Liz. She was a science teacher, is a science teacher, and was trained to be a nurse at the time as well.

HOST: That's Becky Rush. Becky has spent the last three years studying Digital Media Development at the University of Brighton. But her life is just about to dramatically change.

BECKY: Next week I am graduating and then in a couple of weeks after that I will be starting my first graduate job, but as a, a mid level developer at BBC news in the Visual Journalism Team as a web developer.

HOST: This will be Becky's first full time job, working as a developer for one of the world's biggest media groups. But her early interest in science and technology was inspired not just by media, but the outdoors. Becky describes trips into the countryside with her Aunt Liz, who would fill their time with fun and exciting science experiments.

BECKY: The experiment I remember best that we did was having a little pressure pad. I think it was a kit from like the early learning centre or something. We made these little rockets that you would jump on and they would fly off into the sky and see how far they go and race them with each other and like she just sort of showed tips for how to make the rockets more aerodynamic and things like that.

HOST: It was also Aunt Liz that provided Becky with her first computer.

BECKY: Liz had got one from the school that she been working at, they were gonna chuck it out. So I just remember having this huge box of a computer in our room. I don't think it was before we had internet at home and I remember just sitting on it and playing with computer games and Paint, mostly Paint, and it still had the etchings of the school name and the side of it. And that was my first experience of having a computer.

HOST: There is a moment in our young school life when we are asked to make big choices about our future. But we can only make choices based on what we know and what we see. We look to the people around us, whether it is people in the media, people at school, or people in our family for clues that tell us 'I could do that'. For Becky it was her family.

BECKY: I've grown up with my mum being a particular inspiration for me. She works in admin at the hospital and then I realised that actually most of my family does, so she has four sisters and a brother and they were either teachers or work in healthcare and most of my cousins seem to work in healthcare as well, paramedics or nurses or GP managers and stuff. So it's been, there's a lot of influence in my life around healthcare and technology as well because one of my cousins is an app developer. I've been fortunate enough to have that sort of influence on me throughout my life actually.

HOST: The family history in healthcare informed Becky's choices after her GCSEs. She worked for several years in a local hospital as a patient access clerk answering phones, but then decided it was time for a change.

BECKY: I spoke to my manager and she moved me into her team, which was just her actually, we created a little team...working in data analysis, so we would match up missing test results to patient records and create reports that went to Public Health England and stuff like that. And that I found much more satisfying and interesting from what I had been doing.

HOST: And that was it. She started to really enjoy working with data and after speaking to her app developing cousin, Becky decided that tech was going to be her life from that point on. The support of her family and manager had been crucial to her career choices, but it was that early role model of her science teacher Aunt Liz that really sowed the seed, and showed Becky that STEM is something women do too.

For some it can be a stranger, or even a place that helps shape people's careers choices. Here's Kim England, a Global Community Director at Pearson.

KIM: For a very long time I've been an admirer of Sue Black from a distance... she sparked my interest when she started the campaign to save Bletchley Park. And the reason for this is because I was actually born in Bletchley, And I think it's such a massive part of our history. Sue has done a fabulous job of not only saving Bletchley Park, but she's really enriched the lives of the people who live in Milton Keynes by drawing attention to this fabulous place and everything that actually happened there during the Second World War.

HOST: Sue Black is a British computer scientist who was instrumental in saving Bletchley Park, the site of World War II codebreaking.

KIM: Now more than ever, we're hearing about some of the most fabulous people from our history, from our present and women who are going to be amazing in tech in the future. And I think Sue is really leading the charge in terms of giving women in tech a voice and I just think she's fabulous

HOST: In this episode, we're going to discuss how Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, what we call STEM, role models from all walks of life are essential for young people, and what needs to be done to ensure that those who want to be it, can see it.

This is Nevertheless, a podcast about learning in the modern age. Each episode we shine a light on an issue impacting education and speak to the women creating transformative change. Supported by Pearson and hosted by me, Leigh Alexander.

ANNE-MARIE: I have always been a very creative person. I have always enjoyed understanding how things work and understanding, like, logical things and understanding whether it's theorems or whether it's understanding processes and being like, oh actually if I do the same thing again, here's what that process or here's what that function does to that thing, right.

HOST: That's Anne-Marie Imafidon. She was a child prodigy from East London who became the youngest girl ever to pass A-level computing at just eleven years old.

ANNE-MARIE: My earliest memory is being about four and typing the story of Little Red Riding Hood on my dad's computer and changing her hood from red to purple because purple is a slightly better colour and it was probably gibberish because I was four but saved it in the computer and then had to go to bed because bedtime is a thing, and then woke up the next morning and was kind of really excited at the fact that even though that computer had been off and I'd been asleep, my story was still in that computer. To this day that's still what kind of excites me about these kind of technical things and you can make something, make anything from a database to a website to an AI assistant to an app and when you're there, someone else is deriving value or use from it.

HOST: At twenty she received her Master's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Oxford, and is now the CEO of Stemettes, an organisation dedicated to championing the work of women in STEM.

From that early inspiring moment of saving her story in the family computer, Anne-Marie began her passion for technology. But while she studied at a level far beyond her peers, it wasn't until her teens, during an internship in the IT department of a bank, that she realised technology could be a career.

ANNE-MARIE: Oh my goodness, these people play with tech all day and people build it and I'm in this department and the people in that department are using the tech that we've just built or the project managing we've just done, or whatever. So I really enjoyed that. I enjoyed how much I was being paid because again, I never had pocket money. It wasn't like a thing in our house. And like we never really... I mean there's five kids in East London, there wasn't a lot of money around. We weren't poor, but I wasn't saving up to buy X, Y, and Z because that just wasn't how things were in my house. So it was like, okay cool, this is something I'm going to do, I'm gonna, really enjoy it and I'm going to work in it.

HOST: It was during this part of her career that Anne-Marie was sent to a conference in the USA to talk about the cloud and collaboration tech that she and her team had been building. And that's where everything changed.

ANNE-MARIE: On one occasion we were sent to a conference in the States to talk about the technology we'd been building and it just so happened that conference was the Grace Hopper celebration of women computing. That year there were three and a half thousand women there. This last year there were 18,000 women.

HOST: This was her 'Road to Damascus' moment. It was here that she realised throughout her life she had been in a minority. Once Anne-Marie realised that her industry was not diverse, she saw it as a problem to be solved. How many other girls are there out there who are like her, but who don't have the same encouragement or environment? She founded Stemettes as a way to reach and support those girls, offering 'free food and fun' at hackathons and other events across the UK which have so far reached over 38,000 girls.

A diverse workforce is better for everyone, but STEM in particular has a diversity problem.

When women do work in STEM, it's not usually in senior positions. Professors in academia are mostly male, and just a quarter of senior managerial positions across the entire UK STEM workforce are women.

This diversity problem is also a role model problem.

The theory goes like this. If you can see someone who looks like you, whose life experiences are like your own, then you know you can do what they've done. Those life experiences often include discrimination or bullying. If your teacher or university lecturer or manager or the owner of the company you work at is someone like you and has been through similar experiences, then you know you can aspire to that position too. It also means that you know those senior networks are open to you, that you are welcome.

It's a theory borne out by much evidence. Studies including research by GirlGuiding UK show that women take different education and career paths as a result of the isolation that comes from a lack of diversity and role models.

**

The internet is only one place we see role models. Women are also grossly under-represented in the sort of media young people look up to, like film and television. When we do get screen time it's not as equals or superiors or in powerful jobs like, say, surgeons. The Geena Davis Institute is a charity which analyses media, and has found that women are sexualised or stereotyped in films, TV and advertising in a way that men simply are not.

The findings of their research are startling. Out of nearly six thousand speaking or named characters in popular films, only 30% were female.

Only a quarter of the films studied had a female lead, and almost all had more male characters than female. It's the same in advertising, where only a third of adverts feature women. When women are shown in ads, it's not in a position of power or leadership, but in the kitchen.

Here's the role model kicker: Men are nearly twice as likely to be shown doing a job that requires what's known as "integral intelligence". That's jobs like doctor or scientist or engineer. Our girls are looking at the TV screen and they are not seeing themselves in STEM. They are not seeing role models.

When they do see role models onscreen, it works. For decades, something called The Scully Effect has been cited as a contributing factor to women entering STEM careers. It's named after the character Dana Scully in the sci fi show The X-Files, which was first broadcast in the 1990s. The character of Scully, played by Gillian Anderson, is a medical doctor and FBI investigator, the rational partner to her male colleague Mulder. It's long been claimed that the character of Scully, a high-achieving woman in STEM, has had a positive role model effect. But it wasn't until 2018 that it became a proven fact. In 2018 the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media undertook a major study to test the Scully Effect. Nearly two-thirds of women that work in STEM said Dana Scully served as their role model.

***
As we've seen visibility of women at home and in the media are key factors in encouraging young people and students to choose a career in STEM. But what about the thousands of women all over the world whose achievements in STEM aren't visible?

SARA: There is something incredibly valuable and incredibly satisfying to, to put something out on the Internet to surface a story that wasn't there before to make something available for everyone in the world that simply wasn't there before. So to tell a story that wouldn't have been told otherwise.

HOST: That's Wikimedian Dr Sara Thomas. When sees Wikipedia, she also sees a challenge. Her peers and role models, women in STEM, are largely absent from Wikipedia's six million English-language articles, not because their achievements aren't noteworthy, but because of bias in Wikipedia's own process. For a start, the majority of Wikipedia editors, volunteers who create new articles, are Western men, and were simply creating articles about other Western men, despite North America and Europe only making up a quarter of internet users. Who or what is noteworthy enough for Wikipedia is being heavily filtered through the biased lens of its volunteer editors.

Sara Thomas recognised this bias and decided to do something about it. She is Scotland Program Coordinator for Wikimedia UK, a charity which supports Wikipedia editors. She also volunteers as an editor with Women In Red to turn red links - where a woman is mentioned on a Wikipedia page but does not have her own profile - into blue links, women with a Wikipedia page. In three years, Women In Red has added over 17,000 women to Wikipedia. In July 2018 the volunteer editors are focusing on women in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sara spoke to us from a Women In Red meetup in Edinburgh.

SARA: Women in Red have a number of monthly edit-a-thons, a number of monthly focuses, and as you say, one of them this month is women from sub-Saharan Africa. So one of the issues that we have in terms of systemic bias is it's not just a bias to do with gender, it's also with a lot of things.

Our average Wikimedian on English Wikipedia is male, technically inclined, formally educated English speaker from the majority Christian country, from a developed nation and from the northern hemisphere. So there is a bias towards the global north and it's important to us, and I'm seeing this in chat in between, I work with Wikimedia UK and I hear a lot of this, there's talk about we need to do more around coverage for underrepresented subjects including the global south.

HOST: Wikipedia's own standards for what constitutes 'noteworthy' can also be biased. Proof of achievement, in Wikipedia world, is via mainstream media coverage, and mainstream media also skews heavily male, and heavily white. Recent research by the Guardian shows the problem even reaches children's magazines, with only 5% of cover stars from an ethnic minority.

Studies into who is invited onto current affairs and news programs or quoted in newspapers as an expert show that three quarters are men. When women do appear in newspapers, it is not because of our expertise. A report by feminist campaign group OBJECT stated that newspapers routinely engaged in, to quote, " excessive objectification of women in some parts of the press, reducing them entirely to sexual commodities in a way that would not be broadcast on television, nor allowed in the workplace because of equality legislation ".

Only a quarter of worldwide news stories are about women, but they are mainly written by men. A 2016 study by City University London showed that 94% of British journalists are white.

It's no wonder that the media citations essential to Wikipedia are in short supply for women and people of colour.

SARA: It can be more difficult to prove notability for women, and when you're looking at English Wikipedia, you're looking at a number of different countries. So again, you might be looking at somebody who doesn't realise that you know, a national newspaper for an African country is just as notable as something from say, a different part of America. We have all of those kinds of interplays, but it can be more difficult.

Somewhere like Women in Red is a great starting point for showing people how to get around those policies and how to understand those policies and guidelines and understand this whole back end of Wikipedia. But yeah, create an account and edit, come find us. We will be more than happy to help you.

****

HOST: Another woman who is determined to change the role model landscape is entrepreneur Janneke Niessen. She's the founder of Inspiring Fifty, a Europe-wide organisation dedicated to increasing diversity in the technology sector by making role models more visible in the media.

JANNEKE: First of all, we also connect these women and we get very good feedback from them also, how they help each other and how much it brings them, that they are more in the news. And we also actively approach journalists and conference organisers to put these women forward because in the end it's really important that it's not just a list of women, but actually make sure that their voices are in the media, are on stages.

HOST: Janneke is also an author, and has lectured on the subject of digital media at Amsterdam and Leuven universities. She recognised that role models aren't always adults. Children's own peers can set the example. She decided to create a book for young girls to encourage them into STEM.

JANNEKE: All the research shows that they actually move away from tech quite early around 10, 11, 12 years old. And it's also the same time where they actually make really important decisions with regards to their education. But at that age they think it's boring. They think it's difficult and worse they think they are not capable of it. And that's what I really wanted to change because every girl should have the opportunity to choose whatever they want to choose, but preferably based on correct information. And because we all know it's not boring, it's not difficult and definitely girls can do it, they are really good at it and the problem is not so much that they, that it's really true that they hate it, but they just have the wrong idea of what it is.

HOST: The book she created is called Project Prep, and it tells the story of four young girls who create a fashion app from scratch. Janneke feels strongly that outreach should tap into all of the interests of girls and not just the stereotypically 'nerdy' ones, because so many girls don't realise their everyday interests like fashion or social media are related to technology.

JANNEKE: So ask them, do you want to work in tech? They're like mmm, no, and ask them if they want to work at Snapchat or Instagram and they say yes and they don't see that that's also tech. And that's why we need to show them what tech is and how learning to code learning digital skills translate in what they can do later on in life and how the things that they do like, how they involve a lot of tech as well.

HOST: Janneke's philosophy is 'if they can see it, they can be it'. Recent research by Microsoft shows that the number of girls interested in STEM doubles when they have role models. The report also states that girls who have STEM role models evaluate themselves as higher performers across every STEM subject.

JANNEKE: It's not one silver bullet, it's a lot of small things that will contribute to getting them to choose tech and then also making the older role models, the adults more visible will help too, so they can see where all these women ended up, what kind of jobs they have and they can see how it would, what would be fitting for them.

HOST: Janneke's sentiments are echoed in the teaching industry. Daljit Kaur is head of STEM innovation at Loughborough Grammar School in Britain. She agrees that one of the biggest barriers to diversity in STEM is stereotypical ideas about what science or technology actually are.

DALJIT: For so long engineers has been such a male dominated field. And if you look at the image, that's been portrayed as a male person.

HOST: Daljit tackles this directly, by putting diverse role models in front of pupils. She organises female engineering graduates from Loughborough University to attend workshops at schools, to directly inspire the pupils and show them that engineers can look like them, and engineering can be applied to everything.

DALJIT: Basically, I've gone into primary schools and I've said to the kids, your parents might wear makeup. You might be applying a bit of foundation on. Do you think that's engineering? No, no, of course not. So it's trying to change that word engineering. Trying to get them to get to know this is engineering.

HOST: This philosophy recognises that while gender stereotypes are part of what stops young girls studying STEM, the fact remains that fashion and makeup are core interests of the teen demographic and outreach can embrace that. But it doesn't always go to plan. In 2015, tech giant IBM released a video intended to encourage girls into STEM. The video was called 'hack a hairdryer' and invited girls to reinvent the hairdryer. The backlash was severe. Accusations of sexism and stereotyping flew around Twitter, and IBM eventually apologised and took the video down.

The dilemma is this. If we want to bust stereotypes, maybe we shouldn't be using heavily-gendered language or examples like makeup and hairdryers. But, what if it works? What if those examples are genuinely relatable to girls? Why should those interests be excluded or ignored?

In an article for Fortune magazine, tech journalist and podcaster Stacey Higginbotham interviewed Tricia Berry, the director of Women in Engineering Program at the University of Texas at Austin, about the hack a hairdryer campaign. Stacey writes,

"Tricia Berry explains that her organization used to do a group activity focused on building small robots using a tooth-brush head and a little motor. The robots were called bristle bots. Last year, during the engineering fair the organization held for girls, they switched gears to instead build a butterfly robot using the same components with the addition of wings the girls could color.

Participation soared.

"The response was so different," Berry said. "Was it sexist because we made it into a butterfly? I don't know, but anything to grab their attention and make [tech] relatable."

Stacey Higginbotham takes this concept of relatability further. She believes that engaging girls in STEM doesn't have to mean conforming to gender stereotypes, but is about offering a wide range of options which can also include the butterflies and beauty and pink princesses. So you might include a hairdryer in a whole range of things for young people to 'hack', rather than just focusing on one thing.

STACEY: I think you should just let girls be girls and if you like pink and if boys like pink, anyone can like pink if they want it. And in science and engineering the key isn't just to have quote unquote girly things. It's to have a range of things and right now the range of things you can do in science and engineering is relatively narrow at the instruction and getting people interested layer. I think there are a lot of women who get out into the world and who are like, oh, I really want to change this or take action about something. And they realise that to do this they should've studied coding, which is a terrible thing to have thought. Right. Uh, so I think, I think the issue is just to get people interested is to offer a huge range of things that appeal to anyone and everyone regardless of their gender. So yes, hack a hairdryer, build a battle-bot, make an Arduino-powered dog feeder. Just have a bunch of things that get people interested.

HOST: She takes this approach with her own daughter, using a free service called ' If This Then That ' or IFTTT to bring basic coding and logic into her home in a practical and fun way.

STACEY: There are two things kids relate to. One is there a particular set of interests to is an almost instantaneous feedback for a lot of these things. And the younger the kid, the more quickly that payoff has to come. So I've done things with my daughter, like we use IFTTT which is a service that lets you create if this, then that commands for smart home gadgets and the web. So we actually use that service every year at Halloween to kind of create a haunted house for, for us.

HOST: Stacey's educational use of If This Then That is also fun. The app lets you send commands to your smart home gadgets like Alexa, or web-enabled electrical outlets, to say 'if this happens, then do that'. For Halloween, she showed her daughter how to build a ghost on top of a hairdryer which is then connected to a motion sensor via the app. If someone walks past the motion sensor, the hairdryer switches on and the ghost flutters around.

STACEY: Those kind of things appeal to kids, boy or girl because they let them do something. They're thinking through the problem. They're creating a chain reaction and they see the results right then? Plus it's something they care about, like having an awesome haunted house. That's how you appeal to kids in a non-gendered way and sure some of it could be gendered, but a lot of it's probably just going to be what they would call fun.

HOST: Stacey is showing that role models can begin at home. If role models expand the perception of who is a scientist or engineer, perhaps embracing non-science interests can expand the perception of role models.

*****

Many STEM outreach programmes talk about diversity, but what is meant by that? Diversity can mean gender, it can mean race or ethnicity, nationality, disability, sexuality or age. Are STEM diversity initiatives at risk of trying to make one size fit all? Does diversity itself need to diversify?

The National Center for Women and Information Technology notes some alarming statistics. While 26% of the entire USA computing workforce are women, only 3% are black women.

This is a problem also seen in the UK. At a recent British political initiative, an all-party parliamentary group for diversity in STEM, one panelist raised the issue of ethnic minorities in engineering.

Dr Nike Folayan, the Association for Black and Minority Ethnic Engineers, told the group that while 25% of engineering graduates are from ethnic minority backgrounds, only 6% of working UK engineers are. That means that BAME engineering graduates are not transitioning into the workplace, and Dr Folayan works to find out why.

She campaigns for better representation in her industry, and in 2016 coordinated a major initiative called Transition - a series of 'employability' workshops to help address the unemployment challenges facing engineering graduates of colour. Her interventions are working; 70% of attendees gained employment within 12 months of graduating.

But while one-to-one interventions work, the biggest diversity challenges come from a lack of data. Dr Folayan points out that there is currently no data for proportion of BAME women working in engineering. Indeed, the data gap became startlingly apparent when we researched this episode.

The failure of a 'one size fits all' approach to diversity is echoed in studies. A 2017 literature review from Birkbeck analysed studies of the experiences of African-American women academics and PhD students and found that while mentoring is particularly beneficial, women of colour face different forms of discrimination and therefore need additional support strategies.

There is change in the air. In March this year, the Marvel film Black Panther made headlines for its breakout star Letitia Wright's portrayal of scientist and inventor Shuri, whose innovations help...well, to save the world. If the Scully effect holds true, then Shuri is an essential role model for black girls. Children from the American charity Black Girls Code attended a special screening of Black Panther as the guests of tennis champion Serena Williams and her husband, tech entrepreneur Alexis Ohanian, an event documented on Williams' Instagram. Superheroes are one way young girls of colour might learn that they are welcome in STEM. We return to Stemettes CEO Anne-Marie Imafidon:

ANNE-MARIE: It's interesting when we're talking about STEM role models, I looked back and was a little bit frustrated that given the experience I'd had, like if there was anybody that was looking for girls that were technical, you would have found me and been like, hey Anne-Marie, join the X-Men, you're one of the X-Men and come and join our organisation or a community or a program and I've never had that at all the entire way.

So yeah, I kind of started Stemettes as a response to all of that and the fact that we now have this Instagram generation where it's not just about theorems and theories, but actually this is like real life from real stuff that they interact with anyway.

HOST: In the first ever episode of Nevertheless we interviewed Sue Black, who is mentioned at the start of this episode. In it Sue talked about her Stem Role Model Dame Stephanie Shirley and questioned why someone with her achievements weren't as well know as male innovators. Sue has worked tirelessly to bring recognition to women whose achievements have been overlooked, inspiring may to choose a career in STEM. We return to Kim England again...

KIM: I think if I ever met Sue Black I'd probably be star struck at for a couple of minutes... then I would just say thank you. Actually I would say thank you for doing what you're doing. Please keep doing what you're doing, um, and in and continue to inspire another generation of women in technology.
CREDITS:
Nevertheless is a Storythings production - Series Producer is Renay Richardson. Executive Producer Nathan Martin and Anjali Ramachandran. This episode was produced and written by Tracy King. Music and sound design by Jason Oberholtzer and Michael Simonelli, supported by Pearson, and presented by me, Leigh Alexander.

This season we're shouting out some unsung heroes in STEM and the first person I'm shouting out is Janelle Shane. Go to aiweirdness.com to find out more about her work with neural networks.

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BECKY: One person that really inspired me when I was a kid was my Aunt Liz. She was a science teacher, is a science teacher, and was trained to be a nurse at the time as well. HOST: That's Becky Rush. Becky has spent the last three years studying Digital Media Development at the University of Brighton.

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With people stuck at home, schools closed around the world, and the global economy changing rapidly, we're doing everything we can to make sure learning doesn't stop. Here, you'll find all the programs and resources we've created to help our learners.

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Version 2 of the Calculator Pad is now available. Our newest version includes >2500 Physics and Chemistry problems organized into >250 ready-to-use problem sets. Numerical information is randomly-generated. An answer box allows students to solve and check their answers. Most problems are accompanied by an audio-guided solution that explains how to solve a similar problem while hilighting the habits that can be adopted for solving any problem. Teachers with Task Tracker accounts can modify problems and problem sets and even create their own problems. Task Tracker also allows teachers to assign problems to their students and track their progress.

Concept Checkers were built to coordinate with the Physics Interactives section of our website. Relying upon our Task Tracker tool to deliver questions, check answers, and track student progress, a Concept Checker is designed to coordinate with an interactive simulation. Use it as a follow-up check to understanding after exploring the simulation. Most sims are accompanied by a Concept Checker. Some sims have Task Tracker code built into the simulation. But not all sims will have a Concept Checker. Concept Checkers can be used with or without a Task Tracker account.

The Science Reasoning Center is our most recent upgrade. This section (once complete) will include more than 50 activities that are perfect for encouraging scientific reasoning skills. Students use science and engineering practices, combined with cross cutting science concepts and core ideas from the disciplines of physics (and chemistry) to analyze phenomenon, experiments, and data presentations. NOTE: We broke ground in April of 2023; we should have a large portion of content available by August of 2023. We will continue work throughout the 2023-24 school year.

A collection of pages with questions and answers/explanations which serve as reviews or practice. Each review complements a chapter from The Physics Classroom Tutorial.

A variety of question-and-answer pages which target specific concepts and skills. Topics range from the graphical analysis of motion and drawing free body diagrams to a discussion of vectors and vector addition.

Calling all high school juniors: You've trusted The Physics Classroom to help prepare you for that unit exam in physics. Why not trust us to help prepare you for the biggest test of the year - the ACT test? That's right. Let the TPC help you with the ACT.

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The Physics Classroom serves students, teachers and classrooms by providing classroom-ready resources that utilize an easy-to-understand language that makes learning interactive and multi-dimensional. Written by teachers for teachers and students, The Physics Classroom provides a wealth of resources…

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Online courses for those who can't access CPD directly at the STEM center
Most useful impact? Run courses as departments to stimulate discussions

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Teacher Development: Embedding Mental Health in the Curriculum

Develop skills to design inclusive teaching, learning, and assessment activities that enhance student mental health and wellbeing.

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STEM Teaching Courses - STEM CPD Courses - FutureLearn - FutureLearn

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Improve your STEM teaching skills and explore STEM teaching strategies with online STEM teaching courses on FutureLearn

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The RSC are offering their online courses for free until July 2020

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Our courses are designed to give you an in-depth understanding of key concepts in teaching chemistry. Each course can be completed at your own pace, giving you time to try out new strategies and activities in your classroom before progressing further.

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The IoP offers multiple CPD opportunities and information

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Keep your skills and knowledge up-to-date with our CPD events.

What we offer

We run:

How to book

Visit Talk physics to take a look at what's on offer and book an event near you.

Join our mailing list to hear about the latest events and resources near you.

If you'd like to speak to us about any of the events in your region or request a workshop for your school, please contact our representative in your region:

If you'd like to speak to us or require more detail regarding one of our events or CPD, please email teachercpd@iop.org

Do you provide CPD for physics teachers?

In collaboration with other physics professional developers, we aim to support those providing physics CPD by:

learning from other CPD providers by bringing together communities of physics coaches to share good practice

supporting those new to coaching and enriching the professional standing of physics teachers through chartership (CPhys)

interrogating the latest research to see how it might improve our CPD provision

assessing the impact of our education projects and how they align with our new strategy through rigorous data analysis

Join our professional practice group mailing list to keep in touch with the latest coaching events and resources from our team.

For more information about our work supporting physics CPD professionals, please contact education-ppg@iop.org

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Keep your skills and knowledge up-to-date with our CPD events. We run: Visit Talk physics to take a look at what's on offer and book an event near you. Join our mailing list to hear about the latest events and resources near you.

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A teacher support page from the IoP including physics narratives, teaching guidance and activities from ages 5-16
Most useful impact? Put time aside to work through a topic before teaching for a holistic overview

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The Supporting Physics Teaching materials are designed specially for teachers who are new to teaching physics and those wishing to develop their existing skills. They are grounded in wide-ranging evidence and enriched with the wisdom of practicing classroom teachers of physics. The materials develop your professional subject knowledge across these facets:

building a coherent and defensible physics narrative (PN)

developing an appreciation of the teaching and learning issues (TL)

expanding your range of teaching approaches (TA)

Most resources have been migrated over to this website - IOPSpark - from supportingphysicsteaching.net but if you find any mistakes or missing content, please let us know via spark@iop.org.

Teaching Electric Loops to students aged 5-11

Teaching Motion and Force to students aged 5-11

Teaching Hearing and Seeing to students aged 5-11

Teaching Electric Circuits to students aged 11-14

Teaching Electromagnetism to students aged 11-14

Teaching Energy to students aged 11-14

Teaching Earth in Space to students aged 11-14

Teaching Forces to students aged 11-14

Teaching Light to students aged 11-14

Teaching Machines to students aged 11-14

Teaching Motion to students aged 11-14

Teaching Sound to students aged 11-14

Teaching Electricity and Energy to students aged 14-16

Teaching Force and Motion to students aged 14-16

Teaching Radiations and Radiating to students aged 14-16

Evolution of Supporting Physics Teaching materials

The project started in 2002 with six groups of teachers of the sciences, each led by a university-based teacher educator. Since the initial publication, former teacher and teacher trainer Ian Lawrence has curated the resources, organising, editing and updating them. The primary resources were developed in partnership with Primary Science Teaching Trust in 2014-15.

Support

Log onto TalkPhysics for support, where there are dedicated groups for each topic, in addition to a technical group which functions as a 'how to', FAQ and technical problem solving area.

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The Supporting Physics Teaching materials are designed specially for teachers who are new to teaching physics and those wishing to develop their existing skills. They are grounded in wide-ranging evidence and enriched with the wisdom of practicing classroom teachers of physics.

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A list of topics, common misconceptions and hinge questions that can be used to probe student's understanding
Most useful impact? Planning around misconceptions that may arise in the classroom

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Alongside the William's words book there are free resources for writing and spelling on the William's words website

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These are short literary tasks, pupils need to explain the meaning of a few words, then write a sentence containing further words.

The copyright for all diagrams and games remains with SmallWords.
All the resources are free for use by any person or organisation that is not-for-profit.
Web Design Givemegraphics.net | Site Map

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small words science book william's words

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These are short literary tasks, pupils need to explain the meaning of a few words, then write a sentence containing further words. The copyright for all diagrams and games remains with SmallWords. All the resources are free for use by any person or organisation that is not-for-profit.

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A collection of science and maths diagnostic questions. You can sign classes up for interactive use
Most useful impact? Finding out what your students do and don't know

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Don't spend hours marking books

Diagnostic Questions is a world leading assessment tool that provides detailed insights into student understanding in a fraction of the time, simultaneously reducing your workload and improving student results and confidence.

25,000 Questions & Quizzes

Create your own or choose from the thousands created by teachers, awarding bodies and publishers.

Learn more

Actionable Insights

Use our powerful Data Analytics, Feedback and Planning tools to understand your students better than ever.

Learn more

Free forever

We're in the business of helping teachers. We know how tight departmental budgets are, we know the pain of change and we know how frustrating it is when a product you've come to depend upon starts charging. Well, we're giving you, the teacher in the classroom, a promise that Diagnostic Questions will always remain free. It's a small gesture, but we hope it helps.

Supported Subjects

Expected in November 2016, the ultimate GCSE Computing companion, with Scheme of Work and 1000s of questions from OCR and teachers.

750 questions from the Royal Society of Chemistry plus 1000s of others from teachers across the UK covering, Biology, Chemistry and Physics.

We want to support the most popular subjects that you teach. Help us focus on subjects that will make a difference by voting for our next subject.

Resolving misconceptions improves performance

A continuous system of misconception identification provides teachers with the foresight they need to intervene effectively in students' learning.

"Good diagnostic questions encapsulate our best information about what students find difficult, and are an indispensable part of any teacher's repertoire."
Dr. Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment @UCL

"...the single greatest step forward in AFL in the maths classroom for years. I think it would be hard to find any better AFL strategy out there."
William Emeny, greatmathsteachingideas.com

"...good questions help us know more about our students' learning and help us to address misconceptions. An outstanding new resource to help us do just that."
Colleen Young, colleenyoung.wordpress.com

"Discover key misconceptions before you teach, track progress, review students explanations and quickly give personalised feedback."
Mohammed Ladak, mathedup.co.uk

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Better results, more confidence, less time

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A collective of advice, articles and teaching tips from the RSC and teachers

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News, articles and teaching resources for chemistry and science teachers

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Articles written for students exploring the science around them.

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Science News Explores publishes news from all fields of science for students from middle school and up, with resources for parents and educators.

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A look into the 'editathon' to recognize more BAME scientists through wikipedia articles

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A few months ago, I received an open invitation from the Francis Crick Institute's black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) network to join a 'diversithon'. This was described as a Wikipedia 'editathon' aimed at creating and improving the entries of notable BAME scientists - and I was so excited to join in that I immediately signed up.

I brought along my enthusiasm, but had no knowledge of editing Wikipedia - and, I'm sad to say, no idea about whom I should write about. But maybe that was the point. The lack of visibility of BAME scientists emphasizes the fact that we all need to do our bit to change that.

I was also very keen to listen to guest speaker Jess Wade, a British physicist at Imperial College London who has done amazing work adding women scientists to Wikipedia at the phenomenal rate of around one per day. I was impressed by her campaign to get a copy of Angela Saini's book Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong - which debunks accepted scientific 'facts' about women - into every state school in the United Kingdom.

The event, which took place at the Crick in London in November 2018, opened with talks from Yolanda Ohene, a PhD student at University College London, and Sarah Essilfie-Quaye, a research project manager also at Imperial College London. They described their experiences as people of colour working in science. Ohene spoke about being the only woman with a BAME background in her classes, and Essilfie-Quaye shared an experience of being ignored when a room-booking clash led to problems.

At the Crick, I'm part of a team of senior scientists who run unconscious-bias awareness training for staff, which has made me much more aware of the hurdles that disadvantaged sections of society face. But the talks by Ohene and Essilfie-Quaye really highlighted the continuing negative experiences that people of colour encounter.

After a break and a chance to mingle with other would-be Wikimedians, it was time to go back to listen to Wade. She spoke about how creating Wikipedia articles about women and BAME scientists really can increase their visibility, and alter perceptions of who is and can be a scientist.

It was then the turn of Alice White, a digital editor at the Wellcome Collection in London, to get us started. The first step for those like me who had never edited Wikipedia was to create an editor account.

The next step was to decide who to add to Wikipedia. Thankfully, Wade, along with colleagues of mine at the Crick, had suggestions. We could investigate someone on the list, come up with our own ideas or add to an existing biography.

I chose Tumani Corrah, who has been conducting infectious-disease research in his home country, Gambia, for more than 30 years. I visited Gambia last year to promote Crick African Network training fellowships to potential applicants, so it seemed a great fit. As we each investigated the background of our chosen scientist, we became inspired by their achievements.

White guided us through the technical aspects of creating an article by introducing us to the 'sandbox' as a place in which to write text that is saved but not immediately published. After choosing the sandbox option and commencing the editing process, we simply had to 'insert a paragraph' and start typing. White advised that, to save time laying out the web page appropriately, we copy and paste an existing page with a similar outline to the ones we wanted to make, and edit the text from there.

Once this framework is in place, editing and adding citations is remarkably straightforward. We were advised that images add substantially to biographies, and that it's important that they have the correct permissions. I asked the organization that Corrah works for (the Africa Research Excellence Fund) to upload a profile photo to WikiCommons, which they did.

After an hour or so, my skills at citing references and looking for evidence of achievement had improved considerably, and I was carried on a wave of energy and purpose by seeing my fellow novice editors making progress. I selected 'Submit for publication' to have my article reviewed by an experienced editor.

A week or so after the diversithon, my article was published - a proud moment indeed. Since the event, it has been a pleasure to see the pages written by other participants being published. To write one entry might be only a small thing, but lots of small actions by many people can make a big difference. I'm a novice Wikipedia editor, but I'm doing my bit, too. In response to Jess Wade's New Year call to action, I have decided to write one Wikipedia entry a month in 2019 for under-represented groups. Helen Walden, a structural biologist at the University of Glasgow, UK, was my January entry, and Victoria Cowling, a cell biologist at the University of Dundee, UK, was my February offering. Watch this space in the months ahead.

Joining the diversithon also gave me several contacts whom I have approached for guidance and troubleshooting. And for anyone thinking of joining the Wikimedian tribe, by either hosting an editathon or starting editing by yourself, there is plenty of advice available on the web, including Wikipedia's very own event guide and this handy editing manual from Art+Feminism.
This is an article from the Nature Careers Community, a place for Nature readers to share their professional experiences and advice. Guest posts are encouraged. You can get in touch with the editor at naturecareerseditor@nature.com.

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Why we're creating Wikipedia profiles for BAME scientists

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How an 'editathon' can help black, Asian and minority ethnic scientists - and science as a whole, explains Nicola O'Reilly. How an 'editathon' can help black, Asian and minority ethnic scientists - and science as a whole, explains Nicola O'Reilly.

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One of the resources form IoP looking to address the gender gap for KS3/4 scientists

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A discussion workshop for KS3-4 female students.

This workshop, developed in partnership with WISE and Intel, is designed to inspire girls about the STEM subjects where they are under-represented, such as physics and computer science.

The workshop uses role models to facilitate small group discussion and explore gender stereotyping in a comfortable and safe environment. The discussions look at myths and facts about girls and women in STEM, how these subjects connect with issues that girls care about and their importance as a gateway into a wide range of interesting jobs and careers.

Science: It's a people thing is an off-timetable, girls-only activity, designed to run as a session of either 60-90 minutes, or a longer half-day event. The session is suitable for girls aged 13-16, but could be easily adapted for use with a younger age group aged 11-12.

The downloadable resources below include all that is needed to run a session and are intended for teachers, as well as ambassadors and role models going into schools. They include advice on how to find role models and brief them as well as editable PowerPoint slides to use in the workshop.

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science: it’s a people thing - a discussion workshop for girls

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A discussion workshop for KS3-4 female students. This workshop, developed in partnership with WISE and Intel, is designed to inspire girls about the STEM subjects where they are under-represented, such as physics and computer science. The workshop uses role models to facilitate small group discussion and explore gender stereotyping in a comfortable and safe environment.

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Easily downloadable PDFs for students to build up scientific thinking. PDFs

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Cutting edge scientific research accessible to kids. A free STEM teaching resource.

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Stories from behind the scenes of BBC nature programs and a look at the different ecological settings

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Close your eyes and open your ears
Subscribe now:
The BBC Earth Podcast is back with a third series from Thursday 31st October. This time, we're taking you behind the scenes and sharing untold stories from our latest landmark series - Seven Worlds, One Planet - from the perspective of camera crew, producers, researchers and scientists alike. Alongside these stories, you'll hear tales from people all over the planet, exploring the huge array of environments on our planet, from the beauty of vast sand dunes to the eerie deep sea floor; unveiling the harsh reality of disappearing species and miraculous rediscoveries of animals thought to be nearing extinction.

Stories from seven worlds and beyond

Featured Videos

A journey in sound

BBC Earth's podcast is everything you'd expect - a blend of nature, science and human experience, with worldclass story telling and immersive soundscapes. We'll also bring you insights and stories from the BBC's crews as they make some of the most impactful television on the planet. Expect a dose of fascinating science, ecological insight and explanations of why the world - in its infinite variety - is as we find it. From the deepest caves in the world to the very edge of space the BBC Earth podcast transports you on an awe-inspiring journey in sound.

Presenter/Producer: Emily Knight
Editors: James Cook and Clare McGinn
Executive Producers: Rhyanna Coleman, Kara Segedin, Liz Jaynes

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Subscribe now: The BBC Earth Podcast is back with a third series from Thursday 31st October. This time, we're taking you behind the scenes and sharing untold stories from our latest landmark series - Seven Worlds, One Planet - from the perspective of camera crew, producers, researchers and scientists alike.

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Short podcasts about under-recognized women including scientists, activists and mathematicians such as Ada Lovelace, Greta Thunberg, Wangari Maathai and Katia Krafft.

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Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls Podcast

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Our audio adventures about extraordinary women have moved to a new home: the Rebel Girls App. Learn more.

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A brilliant website from the University of Birmingham bringing researchers in contact with education, providing loads of resources, definitions and challenges

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We are a group of chemistry researchers who are passionate about showcasing the importance of chemistry. Many things in our everyday lives depend on chemistry and chemistry researchers are tackling some of the biggest challenges facing our world.

We believe that teaching chemistry through 'real-world' examples makes it more exciting for the teachers and the pupils. Our award-winning website contains resources for teaching and learning, including lesson ideas, experiments, videos and images. The resources link the chemistry from the UK national curriculum to research and 'real world' chemistry from universities and industry.

The ChemBAM team is based in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham. If you are based in the area and would like to request us to run a workshop in your school of community group please click here for more information.

The website is currently edited by chemists Ruth Patchett, Zoe Schnepp, and Nicola Rogers with many contributions from a whole host of scientists.

If you are a scientist and would like to contribute to this website please contact Zoe Schnepp at the University of Birmingham. If you want to find out how to use our resources for outreach activities, take a look at the following page.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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Welcome to ChemBAM! We are a group of chemistry researchers who are passionate about showcasing the importance of chemistry. Many things in our everyday lives depend on chemistry and chemistry researchers are tackling some of the biggest challenges facing our world. We believe that teaching chemistry through 'real-world' examples makes it more exciting for the...

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Education and training products to get students into computing and coding

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Computing is a vital aspect of today's world. We want to empower teachers to give young people the skills they need to shape this world.

That's why we provide high-quality CPD training courses, classroom resources, and online events for teachers. All for free.

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Teach computing and digital making - Raspberry Pi

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Computing is a vital aspect of today's world. We want to empower teachers to give young people the skills they need to shape this world. That's why we provide high-quality CPD training courses, classroom resources, and online events for teachers. All for free.

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Helpful for those tricky plant practicals that never seem to work in the lab. Method sheets and detailed advice on how to make experiments work are here. Also information on grants and STEM club resources.

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Science & Plants for Schools - free teaching resources for science and plant biology, for primary, secondary and A-level

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An accessible summary of the international evidence on teaching 5-16 year olds.

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An accessible summary of the international evidence on teaching 5-16 year-olds.

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A Chemical Orthodoxy - Adam Boxer Resources

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A Chemical Orthodoxy - Adam Boxer Resources

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Chemistry Resources from Twitter voice @adamboxer1 - mostly orientated around practicals.

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Required Practicals - Integrated Instructions

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Required Practicals - Integrated Instructions

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AQA required practicals with integrated instructions to enable all students to access methods more easily.

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Teaching Resource Bank to support Remote Teaching and Learning

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Teaching Resource Bank to support Remote Teaching and Learning

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Teach First have collated resources from different organisations for remote teaching

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Method sheets and web links providing more information around all of the major practicals facing biology teachers.

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SciberMonkey is an excellent website that points students and teachers to thousands of resources spanning age 5-16 biology chemistry and physics.

The Practical Biology website has a wide variety of practical activities demonstrating a range of biological concepts that can be used in secondary school biology lessons.

We have put together a document to highlight resources to support practical work at A level in England and practical work at A level in Wales . There is also a document to compare the exam board specifications for and biology in England and a document to compare the A level content .

Biology Changing the World has interesting information and video interviews about biologists who made a difference to the world today.

Gopher Science Labs has a range of hands on practical science activities which encourage peer to peer learning.

We have informal activities to use, available on our biology for all pages and outreach pages. Every October you can get involved with Biology Week. School involvement is a crucial part of the celebrations, with quizzes and specially designed creative activities to help you take part. Resources are available all year round.

We offer careers resources to support students in schools and colleges. We have also produced a selection of lesson plans and presentations to help teachers highlight future career options and opportunities available to their students.

We run the Biology Challenge competition for students aged 13-15, and the Biology Olympiad competition for students ages 16-19 taking their A levels or Highers. The Olympiad selects the UK team members to compete in the International Biology Olympiad.

Find out about news, events and resources through our monthly BioEd letter, sign up through mySociety. Our Journal for Biological Education covers policy and curriculum developments, bringing you the latest results of research into the teaching, learning and assessment of biology. If you conduct education research in schools you may be interested in joining our Biology Education Research Group (BERG).

Talk to us and others with an interest in biology on TalkBiology the forum for the biology community. Take part in our consultation on the ideal biology curriculum.

Be recognised for your teaching excellence with our secondary school biology teacher of the year award and apply for Chartered Science Teacher Status. We have CPD for teachers and have sessions which run at the ASE conference which include talks by BERG and a session on Biology in the Real World.

If you are looking for further support check out our primary schools, higher education, outreach and get involved pages.

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SciberMonkey is an excellent website that points students and teachers to thousands of resources spanning age 5-16 biology chemistry and physics. The Practical Biology website has a wide variety of practical activities demonstrating a range of biological concepts that can be used in secondary school biology lessons.

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The BBO challenges and stimulates students with an interest in biology to expand and extend their talents. It enables students to demonstrate their knowledge and to be suitably rewarded with publicly recognised certificates and medals.

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The British Biology Olympiad (BBO) is open to students around the world.

The 2020 competition took place between 31st January - 7th February 2020.
The BBO challenges and stimulates students with an interest in biology to expand and extend their talents. It enables students to demonstrate their knowledge and to be suitably rewarded with publicly recognised certificates and medals.
The BBO is open to students in post-16 education studying at school or college. The competition consists of two, 45-minute multiple choice papers to be taken online under staff supervised exam conditions.

In addition to encouraging and rewarding pupils in their studies, the BBO is the first stage in selecting a team to represent the UK at the International Biology Olympiad (IBO). The IBO seeks to challenge by both theory and practical tests some of the top pre-university biology students in the world, with over sixty countries taking part.

Team selection for the International Biology Olympiad

The top-scoring sixteen students in the BBO will be invited to complete further theoretical assessments in order to select a team to represent the UK at the International Biology Olympiad (IBO).

The IBO 2020 has been cancelled, however a remotely-conducted IBO Challenge will instead take place.

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The British Biology Olympiad (BBO) is open to students around the world. The 2020 competition took place between 31st January - 7th February 2020. The BBO challenges and stimulates students with an interest in biology to expand and extend their talents. It enables students to demonstrate their knowledge and to be suitably rewarded with publicly recognised certificates and medals.

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Gopher Lab practicals can be used as transition practicals for Year 6 transition days or new Year 7s. All resources are downloadable in a handy booklet here:

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This project supports transition from primary to secondary school with peer to peer learning across age groups. Secondary students learn how to deliver the range of Gopher Science Lab activities to primary pupils. During this process the secondary students develop their skills in communication, innovation and increase their self-confidence.

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Some questions and revision resources for physics are available here

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Welcome to Education Plus. We are a team of experienced educators and markers aiming to share resources and spread our marking expertise to raise attainment for your students in examinations at all levels.

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Welcome to Education Plus. We are a team of experienced educators and markers aiming to share resources and spread our marking expertise to raise attainment for your students in examinations at all levels.

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How can we make science more inclusive for our female students.

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Passionate about promoting STEM and championing diversity and inclusion in engineering.

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Promoting STEM. Championing Diversity & Inclusion.

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Promoting STEM and Championing diversity and inclusion in engineering STEMAZING Ltd

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Teaching resources and advice

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The leading professional body representing many of the learned societies and other organisations making up the diverse landscape of the biological sciences, as well as thousands of individuals

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The Ogden Trust aims to increase the uptake of physics for all at post-16, particularly for those from under-represented groups.

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The Ogden Trust - Promoting the teaching and learning of physics

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The Ogden Trust aims to increase the uptake of physics post-16 by supporting physics education and engagement for all young people (4-18), particularly those in under-represented groups. The Trust supports schools, teachers, projects and programmes that are committed to enhancing physics teaching and learning.
Explore the Trust

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The Ogden Trust: supporting physics education & engagement

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The Ogden Trust supports schools, teachers, projects and programmes that are committed to enhancing physics teaching and learning: Making Physics Matter.

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The Ogden Trust aims to increase the uptake of physics for all at post-16, particularly for those from under-represented groups.

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Articles from the RSCs magazine for students from 2012-2015

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A blog set up by students trying to establish a place for girls in science

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Cellfie was founded with the intention of inspiring other young girls to pursue their interest in STEM subjects. Enjoy browsing our blog and (hopefully) magazine issues every two months. From fashion to collaborations to music, Cellfie has got you covered when it comes to ionically bonding STEM into teenage girlhood! 🙂

Our founders are all feminists and believe strongly in gender equality and promoting women in STEM to show younger girls they can rock science!

"Cellfie's aim is to make the STEM community more diverse"

- Cellfie Founders

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Cellfie was founded with the intention of inspiring other young girls to pursue their interest in STEM subjects. Enjoy browsing our blog and (hopefully) magazine issues every two months. From fashion to collaborations to music, Cellfie has got you covered when it comes to ionically bonding STEM into teenage girlhood!

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Physics misconceptions and resources and ideas to overcome them

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By the time a student arrives in a physics classroom, they've had over a decade's worth of experience of interacting with physics in the real world and forming their own ideas about how physics works. Research has shown that taking these student ideas into account greatly improves teaching efficacy. Here, you can discover common misconceptions and children's thinking discussed in the academic literature, as well as strategies and materials for identifying and challenging them in the classroom. At the moment, we have content for two of our seven domains: Forces & Motion and Electricity & Magnetism. We are also uploading a series of articles that explore how to challenge misconceptions when teaching physics. Throughout 2020, we'll be extending our coverage and rolling out new content. Check back soon!

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By the time a student arrives in a physics classroom, they've had over a decade's worth of experience of interacting with physics in the real world and forming their own ideas about how physics works. Research has shown that taking these student ideas into account greatly improves teaching efficacy.

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Free science lesson videos including worked examples. Website also links to practice books available

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Positive news and ideas shared in graph and chart formats.

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Unseen trends, uplifting stats, creative solutions - a new chart every day. From Information is Beautiful.

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ResearchEd is a massive community of teachers bringing research informed practice into the classroom.
Follow ResearchEd on twitter @researchEdhome and check out videos from speakers on youtube

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Links to videos and resources for which are listed by topic across all 3 disciplines.

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Science teaching resources can be found using the search box below. It is best to search by topic e.g. atoms or electrolysis. You can also find ideas on curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, the science lesson and teacher education using this search tool.

Alternatively, follow the links in the table below that list science teaching resources for each big idea. Click here to subscribe to the newsletter.

The majority of the science teaching resources are for students aged 11 to 16 studying science for GCSE or Key Stage 3. Resources are designed to challenge students' understanding of key scientific concepts so that teachers have the opportunity to provide rapid feedback and students can feel a sense of competence when they succeed in understanding the concept.

Main pages for science teachers on thescienceteacher.co.uk

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Science teaching resources | the science teacher

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Science teaching resources can be found using the search box below. It is best to search by topic e.g. atoms or electrolysis. You can also find ideas on curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, the science lesson and teacher education using this search ... Science teaching resources Read More "

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A website with many simple ideas to get your students thinking.
Voice: @sci_challenge

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Science teaching resources and pedagogy to teach key concepts in biology, chemistry and physics.

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Projects & news from research carried out by the Nuffield organisations

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Our student programmes provide opportunities for students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to develop their skills and confidence in quantitative and scientific methods.

One of the objectives of our work in education is to address the shortage of research and quantitative skills across social science students in the UK and by doing so, encourage higher levels of employability, help maintain the UK's status as a world leader in research and enable more people to participate fully in a digital knowledge economy.

Nuffield Research Placements

Opportunities for school and college students to take part in STEM-related research.

Q-Step

Funding for universities across the UK to support the development and delivery of specialist undergraduate programmes.

Between 1996 and 2016, over 16,000 students have participated in Nuffield Research Placements.

Learn more

Nuffield Research Placements are shown to increase the likelihood of enrolling in a STEM course at a Russell Group higher education institution.

View impact

In 2018, 1,940 students started Q-Step degree programmes, with 9,564 enrolling in Q-Step modules in total.

Learn more

Since 1962, the Foundation has supported major curriculum projects and the creation of a wealth of teaching resources across STEM subjects and beyond.

Our work in education includes funding research and supporting its translation into policy and practice. The Foundation has supported some 60 major curriculum projects and countless smaller ones.

The largest and best-known projects have been in science and mathematics, but the story goes much wider, covering languages (ancient and modern), design and technology, economics and business, English, history and more.

While we no longer host our entire catalogue of teaching resources, they are still available online on the following platforms. For each subject, you can find an archive of classroom-trialled teaching and learning resources.

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Student Programmes and Teaching Resources | Nuffield Foundation

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Our student programmes provide opportunities for students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to develop their skills and confidence in quantitative and scientific methods.

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2 minute video tips by teachers, for teachers

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teacher education school cpd pgce "teacher training" scitt nqt k12 teachers learning

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Two minute tips for teachers by teachers #EduTeacherTips Created by: Award winning Deputy Head, EdD student and best selling author Sarah Mullin @MrsSarahMul...

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Activities for teaching vocabulary and use, ideas for all subject included. A short list of common science root words on pg 67

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Breaking down definitions using etymology 

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Breaking down definitions using etymology 

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A helpful video to guide you through using (a paper) dictionary on etymological searches

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A comprehensive list of many common scientific root words

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A massive document (use 'CTRL F' to search through quickly)

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A collection of articles to support the EEF Improving Secondary Science Document

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Seven simple rules for science teaching | Education in Chemistry

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Practical guidance to make evidence-based teaching accessible

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The report & guidance published by the EEF on improving secondary science teaching

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See the teach meet from Amanda Fleck (@AJTF71) and explore literacy in science via the seneca learning course for teachers

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As someone who has taught a lot of science in the past, I absolutely loved hosting Amanda Fleck as she talked about Literacy & Language in Science Education 🧪🧬

500 teachers dialled in from all over the country (and abroad!) to hear Amanda's thoughts and engage in the Q&A!

This talk (along with all the others) was recorded and has been published to YouTube, along with snippets of the best bits! Subscribe to our CPD YouTube channel to catch up on all some great bitesized CPD ▶️

If you are really interested in this topic and want to get a certificate to show for your work, you can even complete Amanda's free course!

These Virtual TeachMeets will be happening weekly so be sure to grab a (remote!) seat at an upcoming event!

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Free Virtual TeachMeet on Literacy & Language in Science

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As someone who has taught a lot of science in the past, I absolutely loved hosting Amanda Fleck as she talked about Literacy & Language in Science Education 🧪🧬 500 teachers dialled in from all over the country (and abroad!) to hear Amanda's thoughts and engage in the Q&A!

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Physics animations and simulations to support learning

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Over 1.1 billion simulations delivered

160interactive simulations

97language translations

3001teacher-submitted lessons

Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

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Founded in 2002 by Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, the PhET Interactive Simulations project at the University of Colorado Boulder creates free interactive math and science simulations. PhET sims are based on extensive education research and engage students through an intuitive, game-like environment where students learn through exploration and discovery.

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Positive articles at accessible levels for students

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This article has been created by Positive News and supported by Good Energy

Putting nature and climate at the heart of the nation's recovery makes economic sense, say business leaders - and the public wants to see action, too

While no one would welcome the tragic losses and suffering caused by the coronavirus crisis, among the silver linings are cleaner air, new social bonds, a slower pace of life and a fall in carbon emissions.

Having much of the population stuck inside while the sun shines has been no fun for anyone, but it has benefitted the environment. With factories closed or at limited capacity, demand for electricity slumped at the height of the pandemic; down by a fifth, according to National Grid. Not only that, but electricity sub-stations have fizzed with solar power in proportions never seen before.

On 25 May, renewable electricity accounted for up to 67 per cent of the UK's total power supply and on 10 June the UK reached a milestone of going two months without firing up its coal power plants - the longest period since the Industrial Revolution. Clean power producers are holding onto their hats, though - and not because of high winds. What makes them cautious is the prospect of the old, powerful fossil-fuel guard lobbying for a return to business as usual when restrictions are fully lifted.

To stave off that prospect, a group of more than 60 business leaders and heads of environmental organisation are pushing the government to take the opportunity to build a fairer and more sustainable economy.

Want to tackle climate change? Good Energy offers 100% renewable electricity generated from sun, wind and water. Use the referral code 'Positive News' and get £50 credit when switching your energy supply. Get a quote and switch now

In an open letter, the motley alliance, which includes the RSPB and supermarket chain, Iceland, calls on policymakers to design a recovery package that holds out hope of a "climate-safe, nature-rich, healthy world for all".

"As individuals and businesses, we need to pressure the government to make sure that they stand firm now and don't shift back into their old habits," says Juliet Davenport, chief executive of renewable electricity provider Good Energy and a signatory to the letter.

Such a transition will require concerted effort, concedes Davenport, who likens it to the government giving up smoking. There are grounds for optimism when it comes to the UK kicking its fossil fuel habit, not least because other powerful groups are calling for the same thing.

In a separate letter, almost 200 chief executives from major UK corporations - including the National Grid and, curiously, Heathrow Airport - expressed their hope for a " clean, just " recovery that, among other aims, delivered on the government's own goals of becoming carbon neutral by 2050.

Public support for climate action

Equally promising is the seismic shift that appears to have occurred in public sentiment. According to a recent survey by pollster Ipsos MORI, 66 per cent of people in the UK now believe climate change is "as serious a crisis" as Covid-19, while 71 per cent believe the government will be "failing them" if it doesn't act to avert today's climate emergency. A separate YouGov poll, meanwhile, found that six in ten adults in the UK think social and environmental issues should be prioritised above economic growth.

A clean bounce-back also increasingly makes economic sense. Not only are solar and wind now generally the cheapest forms of energy, particularly when compared to coal, but a buoyant renewables sector could also generate thousands of new jobs and spur inward investment. Were UK lawmakers to throw their weight behind a net-zero transition, the nation's economy could benefit to the tune of £90bn, according to estimates by the World Wildlife Fund.

But it won't happen for free, warns Shaun Spiers, executive director of the Green Alliance, another signatory to the first open letter, who says energy networks need upgrades to bring them up to date. Emerging technologies, such as hydrogen production and carbon capture and storage, also need investment.

Finance doesn't necessarily have to come from the government, but it can spur on private industry. Spiers gives the example of Contracts for Difference (CfD) schemes, which incentivise investment in renewables by providing developers of projects with upfront costs and fixed prices for future renewable power.

A simple spring clean of the UK's byzantine energy regulations would also go a long way, says Good Energy. Last year the company tried to get an energy storage project off the ground with the Eden Project, but was stymied by the "massive complexity" of regulation. In the end they gave up.

"There needs to be a total redesign of the market to allow for greater flexibility of supply [through energy storage] and for more renewables," Davenport says.

We need to pressure the government to make sure that they stand firm and don't shift back into their old habits

A green recovery isn't just about clean energy, though. In their recent letter to the prime minister, the cross-sector group of leaders also called for greater space for wildlife and people, tighter rules to protect nature and a blanket net-zero emissions test for all new investments, from roads to real estate.

Again, there are reasons to be hopeful. Two government bodies, Defra and the Environment Agency, for instance, recently agreed to co-fund commercially viable habitat restoration initiatives in a bid to attract private-sector funding. The initiatives, which were identified by the Bristol-based ethical bank, Triodos, include a natural flood management scheme in Lancashire and a pollution reduction drive in Poole Harbour.

It is this joined up thinking around a green vision that the signatories of the open letter are urging the government to adopt. As they declare: "we ask you to create something better".
Main image: Good Energy

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Renewal: why clean energy should power the 'new normal'

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This article has been created by Positive News and supported by Good Energy Putting nature and climate at the heart of the nation's recovery makes economic sense, say business leaders - and the public wants to see action, too While no one would welcome the tragic losses and suffering caused by the coronavirus crisis, among the silver linings are cleaner air, new social bonds, a slower pace of life and a fall in carbon emissions.

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Thanks to Gill who shared this in our KS3Sci chats. Use with your departments to discuss how teachers & students approach command words

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A report into socio-economic status (SES) and achievement in science. Thank you to a #KS3Sci contributor

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Research surrounding reading and literacy focuses to use in schools

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A review of some techniques used in lesson to build writing by Thomas Chillimamp. Techniques and in class examples given

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This is the blog version of my part of the joint #CogSciSci talk on Writing In Science with Pritesh Raichura and Matt Perks. The inspiration for me thinking about the writing of my students came from the Writing In Science Symposium hosted by Pritesh with great blogs by a whole host of amazing teachers. This blog is based on a couple of techniques from the amazing book The Writing Revolution (TWR) by Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler, namely 'Because, But, So' and 'Appositive phrases'.

My overall idea is that the improvement in students' writing that comes from being an active part of their writing education allows you to glean more effectively the current understanding that students have of a particular topic. And by understanding, I don't just mean the recall of individual ideas or facts (although this is naturally part of it), but the expression of the links between them. The benefits of better student writing to your assessment of students' current understanding of a domain far outweigh the additional time required (which can actually be very small as I hope to show) to teach the skill of effective writing.

I've started by looking at just sentence level activities, to help students create detailed and complex sentences before they go on to write anything longer. Extended writing shouldn't be the immediate goal; getting the sentence right is vital.

In my mind, I have a simple model of the schema (or schemata if that's your plural flavour of choice) that students are forming, shown below. Facts/ideas are represented as the circles with the links between them as the lines. All students are naturally forming their own unique schema which differ from both your plan and frl. one another in spite of your carefully crafted instruction. I wanted a technique to allow students to express the current state of their schema. So, for a given fact/idea (the grey circle), I might hope a student has formed links to specific other ideas (the yellow, orange and green circles) such as the cause and effect of the 'grey circle' idea. But what links have they actually made and what links have they missed out? To give my students the opportunity to express the current state of the links within their schema, I use an activity called 'Because, But, So'.

'Because, But, So' is a technique, lifted straight from TWR, where students are presented with a simple kernel sentence that they complete with three separate connectives (because, but and so) to emphasise the reason for the idea in the kernel sentence, a contrast to it as well as a consequence of the idea. The crafting of the kernel sentence is key, it needs to give sufficient scope for students to be able to give a reason contrast and consequence based on their instruction so far.

I first used this technique as a form of formative assessment at the end of a lesson with year 7 students studying igneous rocks:

It appeared that my students had formed the links that I was hoping for, with these examples being fairly representative of the entire class. The worry for me, though, was the similarity in their sentences. This made me reconsider the use of 'Because, But, So' after such a short time interval from the initial learning. Was I seeing schema formation here (and hence learning) or just performance on the day based upon the explanation I'd given less than half an hour earlier? Or, had my kernel sentence been too limiting?

With this in mind, I altered the time frame with which I use 'Because, But, So', to have it as an interleaved task on a worksheet a few lessons later (in the example, I'm asking about reflection of waves two lessons later during a lesson on the uses of echos) or in the very middle of a topic as a hinge point for future lessons.

These two examples highlight much better, in my opinion, what has been learned because it's no longer the seemingly perfectly formed ideas of the first example. Leaving time has meant I'm witnessing the more realistic schema that have been formed by students. There are blanks where students can't express a consequence of reflection, confusion about cause and effect, and major misconceptions about what a potential difference does. This allows me to either reteach these ideas completely, do a refutation activity (https://dodiscimus.wordpress.com/2019/03/12/my-mum-misconceptions/), or incorporate some form of recap into a future lesson.

I can't stress enough though that writing good kernel sentences is difficult. You need to spend a long time anticipating possible student responses. The best way of doing this is through discussion with other teachers (and incorporating the feedback into writing better ones). Just chatting to Pritesh and Matt over lunch at CogSciSci (and during our Oscar worthy live modelling section of the talk) was useful to me in thinking about kernels. Not only does the activity get refined by such discussions, but me and Pritesh both had moments of saying "actually I should be teaching them concept X in a different way to avoid that misconception" before the students even get to the writing.

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This is the blog version of my part of the joint #CogSciSci talk on Writing In Science with Pritesh Raichura and Matt Perks. The inspiration for me thinking about the writing of my students came from the Writing In Science Symposium hosted by Pritesh with great blogs by a whole host of amazing teachers.

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A collection of past OCR exam questions (across subjects). Thanks to a #KS3Sci contributor for the link

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All the Papers | Past Papers | Exam Solutions | Mark Schemes

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Find all the papers and past papers on this dedicated page. Past exam papers for every subject along with exam solutions and corresponding mark schemes.

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A range of resources and transition work

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GCSE - Gateway Science Suite - Combined Science A (9-1) - J250 (from 2016) - OCR

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OCR GCSE Gateway Science Suite - Combined Science A (9-1) (from 2016) qualification information including specification, exam materials, teaching resources, learning resources

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A google drive containing extended writing practice booklets

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Literature around Morphology and Etymology in Science

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Literature around Morphology and Etymology in Science

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Abstract

Adolescent students require strategies that are tailored to the specific linguistic demands of curricular vocabulary to support their decoding, spelling, and comprehension of novel big words encountered in texts. In this article, the authors describe a morphological instruction approach for helping students navigate big words in science. Reasons why big words in science are particularly challenging for many students are described, and guidelines for selecting and prioritizing high-utility science morphemes for targeted instruction with adolescent readers are provided. Specific strategies and examples are given, including a detailed example of a lesson that teaches students how and why to use morphological strategies to assist in their decoding and comprehension of unknown big words in science texts. Lists of high-utility science affixes are also provided.

In addition to addressing essential curriculum, today's content-area teachers are encouraged to emphasize literacy skills that are tailored to their respective disciplines ( Houseal, Gillis, Helmsing, & Hutchison, 2016) as a means of developing students' abilities to read, write, and speak as disciplinary apprentices ( Shanahan & Shanahan, 2012). Word learning is a fundamental component of this new emphasis. Word learning is critical as adolescents are expected to "grow their vocabularies through a mix of conversations, direct instruction, and reading" and "determine word meanings, appreciate the nuances of words, and steadily expand their repertoire of words and phrases" ( National Governors Association Center & Council of Chief State School Officers, 2010, "Regular Practice With Complex Texts" section, para. 2).

A promising word learning approach that can be tailored to any content area is morphological instruction ( Bowers, Kirby, & Deacon, 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010; Kieffer & Lesaux, 2010; Reed, 2008). In this approach, readers are taught to attend to the structure of words and morphemes (i.e., meaningful word parts) to help them pronounce, spell, and understand the complex words they encounter while reading content-area texts. Focusing morphological instruction on frequently occurring, consistently spelled morphemes is an efficient way to improve students' decoding, spelling, reading comprehension, and vocabulary skills (e.g., Bowers et al., 2010; Goodwin & Ahn, 2010; Reed, 2008).

Although each discipline has its own vocabulary demands, the complexity of science vocabulary, largely derived from Greek and Latin roots ( Fang, 2006; Green, 2008), often presents a significant access barrier to student learning. In fact, Wellington and Osborne (2001) suggest that it is the "language of science, rather than the content, that is a major barrier to most pupils in learning science" (p. 2). To overcome this barrier and become disciplinary apprentices in science and other content areas, students need direct instruction in advanced word learning strategies (e.g., Kaldenberg, Watt, & Therrien, 2015).

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs), with their expertise in the linguistic underpinnings of literacy including morphology, are in a prime position to collaborate with science teachers to tailor word learning pedagogy to the discipline of science. The purpose of this short tutorial is to provide SLPs with critical information about the complex words adolescent students encounter and must learn to read in the domain of science. The goal is to describe how SLPs can use their expertise in modifying linguistically challenging information by teaching morphological strategies that help students learn words more successfully in science and across the disciplines.

Complexities of Science Vocabulary

Beginning in fifth grade, students encounter about 10,000 new words through text each year ( Nagy & Anderson, 1984). In science, middle school students encounter eight to 10 technical science words on each page of text, and in high school, this number can increase to 22 words per page ( Yager, 1983). Fluent readers of discipline-specific texts quickly identify and decode familiar spelling patterns in these words while determining possible word meanings. Yet many adolescents, even those who were successful readers in the primary grades, struggle to navigate these words for at least three important reasons.

Reason 1: Technical Science Words Are Multimorphemic

Many technical science words, sometimes called "big words," generally consist of two or more syllables, eight or more letters, and in many cases, multiple morphemes ( Cunningham, 1998). For instance, dendrochronology has six syllables, 16 letters, and three morphemes. Students could read the word using a syllable approach (i.e., den-dro-chro-nol-o-gy), which supports decoding for struggling adolescent readers ( Bhattacharya & Ehri, 2004). Syllables, however, do little to help students access spelling patterns or the meaning of a word. Alternatively, students could use a morphological approach to parse the word into meaning-based, pronounceable chunks (i.e., dendro-chrono-logy). This parsing not only supports decoding but knowing something about dendro- (tree), - chrono- (time), and -logy (the study of) also gives clues to the meaning of the word dendrochronology (i.e., the study of the annual rings of trees in determining the dates of past events). A morphological approach helps students to decode and supports recognition of familiar spelling patterns that preserve meanings of multimorphemic science words ( Carlisle & Stone, 2005).

Reason 2: Technical Science Words Have Unfamiliar Spelling Patterns

Teaching adolescent readers to attend to morphemes embedded in technical science words is important because many of these words are structured differently than words encountered in the primary grades. Technical science words are often low-frequency words that have spelling patterns with Greek or Latin origins ( Green, 2008). Instead of strong grapheme-phoneme connections, these words have strong spelling-meaning connections, through which meaning is preserved even when pronunciation changes, as in muscle to muscular ( Cunningham, 1998; Templeton, 2012). Because scientific knowledge is primarily conveyed through writing ( Norris & Phillips, 2003), students who recognize these morphemic patterns in the complex science words they read can access the meanings of the words more easily ( Berninger et al., 2003) even if they cannot successfully pronounce the words.

Reason 3: Technical Science Words Are Often Nominalized

One further complexity of technical science words is the frequent use of nominalizations, or suffixes that transform an adjective or a verb to a noun ( Fang, 2006). For example, the verb magnify is made into a noun by adding the suffix -ication, resulting in magnification. Suffixes such as these do not provide any meaning-based information and may confuse students who do not understand their function. Explicit instruction across repeated encounters with these nominalizing suffixes helps students access the pronunciations, spellings, and eventually the meanings of novel, complex multimorphemic words.

In summary, the fact that many technical science words are multimorphemic, comprised of unfamiliar spelling patterns, and nominalized makes them difficult for many adolescents to decode, spell, and understand. These challenges can, however, be addressed through well-planned, targeted instruction, which will facilitate word reading ( Bowers et al., 2010), spelling, vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension ( Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). The first step in planning and delivering this instruction is identifying the morphemes to teach directly.

Identifying and Selecting Morphemes for Effective Instruction

Teachers and SLPs can use the vocabulary that students will encounter in their science texts and lessons to identify high-utility science morphemes. This vocabulary should include both general academic words related to science (e.g., analyze, differentiate) and discipline-specific words (e.g., biochemical). To select morphemes for instruction, teachers can generate lists of essential vocabulary that are linked to the core concepts of the curriculum. There are also accessible lists of essential science vocabulary in books (e.g., Bear, Invernizzi, Templeton, & Johnston, 2016; Fry, 2004; Kress & Fry, 2016) and research articles (e.g., Coxhead & Hirsch, 2007; Nellenbach, Zoski, Diamond, & Erickson, 2015) that science teachers may find particularly useful when identifying essential vocabulary to target for instruction.

Although many multimorphemic science words students encounter are low-frequency words, they can be navigated more efficiently when they are composed of high-frequency morphemes ( Carlisle & Stone, 2005; Goodwin, Gilbert, & Cho, 2013). SLPs can use teacher-generated vocabulary lists to identify the most frequently occurring morphemes embedded within these essential vocabulary words. SLPs can also combine these morphemes with others from larger corpora to maximize the likelihood that students will encounter morphemes with enough frequency to begin to recognize, with automaticity, spelling patterns that support decoding and understanding of novel words. For example, SLPs might refer to the corpus of 830 frequently occurring science words the authors ( Nellenbach et al., 2015) generated from a variety of textbooks, standards, and reference lists to guide their work in providing this type of morphologically driven word instruction.

For beginning instruction, SLPs should choose morphemes that occur frequently in a corpus of target vocabulary words and also maintain consistency in pronunciation, spelling, and meaning across the target words (e.g., Cunningham, 1998; Templeton, 2012; see Nellenbach et al., 2015, for a review). Appendices A and B detail the high-utility prefixes and suffixes from one corpus of science words ( Nellenbach et al., 2015). These morphemes do not align with every specific grade level or curriculum, but they do offer an important cross-reference SLPs that can use in selecting and prioritizing the morphemes to highlight.

Morphological Strategies and Instruction

Once a set of high-utility morphemes is selected, students can be taught to use morphemic analysis strategies to decode, spell, and understand unfamiliar multimorphemic words. Morphemic analysis involves deriving the meaning of a word by manipulating its meaning-based parts, namely, the roots and affixes. Full knowledge of derivational morphemes, which change word class or meaning when added to a base word, involves several knowledge components: relational (i.e., understanding that words share morphemes), syntactic (i.e., understanding that suffixes change part of speech), and distributional (i.e., understanding which morphemes can be correctly combined; Tyler & Nagy, 1989). These three aspects can be explicitly targeted through morphemic analysis.

There are a number of different strategies that can be used in combination to maximize student success with morphemic analysis. Below we provide an overview of three strategies that we adapted from a variety of resources (see Bear et al., 2016; Blachowicz & Fisher, 2015; Flanigan et al., 2011; Fox, 2012; Goodwin, 2016; Ogle, 2011; Templeton, 2012; Templeton et al., 2014; Wolter & Collins, 2017). For further information about this topic and additional strategies, refer to the recent special issue on morphology published by the International Dyslexia Association (2017).

Dissecting Words by Morphemes

Dissection, a specific word analysis strategy, involves separating and isolating prefixes, roots, and suffixes in novel multimorphemic words. In one dissection activity, students are provided with words written on strips of paper. Working in pairs, students read the words aloud; they discuss recognizable roots, affixes, and their positions in words; and they dissect the word, by cutting the strips into constituent parts. For example, using the word bio-chem-ist, students cut off, pronounce, and separate the three meaningful word parts, bio- (prefix), -ist (suffix), and -chem- (root/base). Once dissected, students are encouraged to discuss (and guess) the role/meaning of the morphemes. When finished, the parts can be placed back together (slid into place or paper clipped) to form the whole word as the students suggest a meaning of the word based on their knowledge of the morphemes. The teacher and SLP can scaffold this activity by engaging in a whole group discussion that includes reading the morphemes aloud, checking the accuracy of dissection, and clarifying the roles/meanings of the morphemes.

A related dissection example is a modified Frayer Model strategy called parts cards (see Stants, 2013). It is important to note that although a primary role of science teachers is to teach the in-depth concepts and meanings associated with core science vocabulary, activities such as the parts cards can be used by SLPs to introduce meaning-based word parts that support students' initial understandings and help them learn strategies they can apply to other words they encounter. Students learn to create meaningful associations by breaking multimorphemic words into their parts. Unlined 4 × 6 index cards are divided into quadrants. The whole word is written in the upper left quadrant as students practice pronouncing the word. The SLP then models the process of breaking the word down into its constituent morphemes, discussing their meanings, and writing both in the upper right quadrant. Next, the students and SLP collaborate to develop and write a definition in the lower left quadrant. Finally, students draw a picture that either represents the word or the morphemes in the lower right quadrant (see Figure 1 for an example). The cards are then organized and stored for data collection and progress monitoring.

Sorting Words by Morpheme

Sorting words by common morphemes helps students recognize frequently occurring spelling patterns and connect them to word meanings. Given a simple table format with shared prefixes, suffixes, or bases as headers, students can be asked to sort words written on paper strips or cardstock into corresponding columns based on shared morphemes. Words can be sorted as a group with a pocket chart, or individually on student desks. Once sorted, SLPs can collect data on student performance by noting the morphemes that are correctly and incorrectly sorted; morphemes sorted incorrectly can be targeted for further instruction. A related strategy is to ask students to use tree diagrams to visually represent a bank of words with common morphemes. A morpheme (and its meaning) is written on the tree trunk, and students are asked to write words that share this morpheme on individual branches. For example, given the base morpheme vore, meaning to eat/devour, students write -vore (to eat) on the trunk and select words like herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, and voracious from a bank of words to write on the branches. The goal is to emphasize the fact that these words share meaning as part of the same word family tree.

Word study notebooks encourage students to actively engage in and take ownership over word learning, as they record, study, and revisit sorting essential and interesting vocabulary. To support a morphological approach to word analysis, word study notebooks can be divided into sections that focus on high-utility morphemes. For example, one section of the notebook could be labeled as need-to-know affixes. Students write a targeted affix at the top of each page in this section and list words that they were given or have collected through reading, writing, and brainstorming activities. Students add words to their notebook as they encounter them while reading and writing. In the age of one-to-one technology adoptions, these notebooks could be transitioned to spreadsheets with a tab for each affix. (Note that the website www.morewords.com is a useful resource for coming up with real words that share spelling patterns/morphemes.)

Deriving Words by Combining Morphemes

Deriving multimorphemic words involves combining one or more morphemes to create words. Instruction focused on word derivation helps students learn to recognize the morphemes in the multimorphemic words they encounter. For instance, in one word derivation activity, students are provided with a base word and bank of affixes written on blank puzzle pieces. Some students may benefit from color coding (e.g., students with learning disabilities), so for beginning instruction, the puzzle pieces can be organized by color such as blue for base words, green for prefixes, and red for suffixes (e.g., see Design-A-Puzzle by Creatology). Students are then asked to select and combine affixes to bases to create a bank of real words. For example, given the base word body and the morphemes anti-, micro-, and alti-, students could create the words antibody and microbody. Teachers initially guide students through this process and then encourage them to reflect on the meanings of the parts and the derived words. Students' derived words and definitions could then be added to morpheme lists in word study notebooks or computer-based spreadsheets for later reference.

Students might also practice deriving words in the context of a sentence. For example, given geology and the sentence, "The woman who studied the layers of the earth is a _______," students derive the word geologist by adding the suffix - ist, from a bank of suffixes (e.g., -ist, -ical, -logy), to the base word. This activity works well as part of a small-group lesson, during which the SLP writes a cloze sentence on a whiteboard and students take turns completing the sentence by deriving a given word.

Instructional Guidelines and Collaborative Approaches for Teaching Morphological Strategies

For morphological instruction to be successful, there are a few guidelines to inform delivery. For example, morphological instruction needs to be taught in the context of rich vocabulary instruction for learning and generalization of strategies (e.g., Freeman & Freeman, 2008; Lawrence, White, & Snow, 2010). It should include purposeful, authentic, and repeated opportunities for students to build knowledge and skills using essential vocabulary words and high-utility morphemes. Instruction in morphemic analysis should also be delivered in a systematic and explicit manner ( Bear et al., 2016; Flanigan et al., 2011) to foster purposeful, strategic thinking.

Although approaches to morphological instruction may vary, in our own practice, we have found that a collaborative approach has yielded the greatest benefits for both students and collaborators alike. Science teachers and SLPs are well suited to work together to provide instruction in morphemic analysis, with each drawing from their own discipline and knowledge base to play unique, but complementary roles. This joint effort can lead to a collective understanding of how both general and specialized language forms embedded in science texts, materials, and discourse are intricately connected to the academic and literacy achievement potential of all students ( Nellenbach & Layton, 2016).

SLPs can collaborate on word learning in the classroom in a number of ways, such as consulting, sharing materials, and modeling. As previously described, for example, SLPs can consult with content-area teachers to obtain lists of essential vocabulary to target for morphemic analysis instruction. In addition, using high-utility literature (i.e., literature that taps into multiple domains/themes), teachers and SLPs can plan and share lessons that simultaneously target important concepts as well as the vocabulary and morphemes used to describe them, thereby effectively tapping into more than one discipline ( Nellenbach & Knight, 2016). SLPs can also collaborate in the classroom setting by modeling word analysis strategies in the context of discipline-specific themes/materials.

The vignette below is an example of a lesson that demonstrates how an SLP modeled morphemic instruction using targeted technical vocabulary in a science classroom. The featured lesson illustrates how systematic morphological analysis instruction can be coordinated with the introduction of a life sciences unit, through the use of a combination of the morphological strategies already described.

Introduction/purpose

"Today we are going to learn about a strategy to help you read, spell, and understand new and complex big words. I know that you keep finding these words when you read, and you keep asking me about them. I want to teach you a strategy that will help you read and understand those words on your own."

New and/or complex technical words

( Writes terminology on the board.) "Look at these words, biochemistry, periorbital, and myocardial. When you see one of these words, what do you do? Let's read them together. While we do, think about what you are doing. How do you figure them out?" ( Lists student-generated strategies on board, discusses advantages and disadvantages of strategies, and asks students to document strategies in their word study journals.)

Affix and base/root dissection activity

( Compares and contrasts two word study strategies: syllabification and morphological problem solving.) "Most big words have clues in them that will help you read them. Let's look at the word, myocardial. We could break apart this word into syllables. Can you help me? How many syllables are there? ( Takes student responses.) There are five, my-o-car-di-al. If we break up the word this way, then we can read each part. Let's do that together, my-o-car-di-al. Now let's put the parts together to read the whole word, myocardial.

Now, let's try it a different way. Instead of looking for syllables, we are going to look for prefixes, suffixes, and roots. These are called morphemes, and they have meaning. ( Draws a table with three columns with the headings prefix, root/base, and suffix on the board.) Who can tell me the prefix for myocardial? ( Continues with root/base and suffix.) Now myocardial is broken into three parts that all have meaning. Do you know what any of these parts mean? Myo- means muscle, -cardi- means heart, and -al means relating to. When you see -al at the end of a word like this, it tells you that the word is describing something. So, what is the word myocardial describing?" ( Students engage in think-pair-share as they work out the meaning.)

( Bringing the students back together.) "I told you before that one of the good things about this strategy is that it will help you read other words that have the same parts. Look at these words, cardiology, cardiograph, echocardiograph. What part of each word is the same as myocardial? Who wants to underline the part that is the same as myocardial? ( One student underlines cardi in each word.) Now, let's look at what is left. ( Works students through stripping and pronouncing the affixes before pronouncing the whole word.) Later this week, I am going to ask you to start adding these word parts or morphemes to your vocabulary notebooks, and we'll work together to look for them in all of the new words we learn this year."

Wrap-up session

( Reviews and highlights the advantages of using morphology as cognitive strategy.) "Using this strategy is going to help you power-up your vocabulary, reading, and writing. Recognizing and knowing how to use the word parts, myo-, -cardi-, and -al will help you read and understand myocardial, and this information is going to help you figure out other parts. I looked online and found that myo- is a prefix in 63 words. There are 87 words that have the root -cardi- and more than 400 words that end with -al. That is some powerful stuff!"

Conclusion

Each year, adolescents must successfully and independently read, spell, and understand thousands of new vocabulary words to access critical content in science and across the curriculum. Yet given the sheer number of words, it is impossible to teach each word explicitly. As a result, we must teach students strategies to independently learn most words. When taught in ways that are meaningful and systematic, instruction using morphological strategies is an effective approach to supporting students' word learning.

Systematic morphological analysis instruction has been shown to support students' decoding ( Bowers et al., 2010), spelling, vocabulary, and reading comprehension ( Goodwin & Ahn, 2010). In this article, we emphasized multimorphemic words in the discipline of science because they present unique challenges, but the instructional approach is not unique to the discipline of science. Although there is a need for continued research to determine the long-term benefits of morphemic analysis instruction on content-area learning, teachers and SLPs can work together to apply the strategies outlined herein to help students increase reading, spelling, and comprehension now and in the future.

Appendix A

Science Segments: Prefixes for Beginning Instruction.

Appendix B

Science Segments: Suffixes for Beginning Instruction.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD
Jennifer L. Zoski http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5519-0951

References

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Using Morphological Strategies to Help Adolescents Decode, Spell, and Comprehend Big Words in Science - Jennifer L. Zoski, Kristin M. Nellenbach, Karen A. Erickson, 2018

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Abstract Adolescent students require strategies that are tailored to the specific linguistic demands of curricular vocabulary to support their decoding, spelling, and comprehension of novel big words encountered in texts. In this article, the authors describe a morphological instruction approach for helping students navigate big words in science.

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Engaging students with science, promoting social justice.

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Chemix is a free online editor for drawing lab diagrams. Simple and intuitive, it is designed for students and pupils to help them draw diagrams of common laboratory equipment and lab setup of science experiments.

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Welcome to your one stop shop for physics resources! I strongly believe in the impact of deliberate practice; and want science/physics teachers to have free access to quality resources built around this. This site currently includes: Nine GCSE physics booklets (tailored to the AQA specification). Thirteen A level physics booklets (AQA).

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Paper 1: Advanced Physics 1: Thursday 15th June * Working as a Physicist ● Mechanics ● Electric Circuits ● Further Mechanics ● Electric and Magnetic Fields ● Nuclear and Particle Physics Paper 2: Advanced Physics 2: Wednesday 21st June Working as a Physicist * Materials * Waves and Particle Nature of Light * Thermodynamics * Space * Nuclear Radiation * Gravitational Fields * Oscillations Paper 3: General and Practical Principles in Physics: Thursday 29th June Questions in this paper may draw on any of the topics in this specification.