How do some teachers manage to expertly engage students in deep learning, harmonize mandated standards with individual student needs, and create trusting relationships in the classroom? What typically sets these "Star Teachers" apart from other teachers? In "What Makes a Star Teacher: 7 Dispositions That Support Student…

The continuing fascination of young people with celestial bodies leads them to pose challenging questions to their science teachers, such as how was the universe born? How were the stars formed? In this paper we present an extremely inexpensive but highly engaging activity to teach the basics of spectroscopy. Guided by the question "how do…

Space exploration is intrinsically interesting to young learners. Children gaze at the stars and marvel at what it might be like to live "out there!" With the July 2020 launch of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover mission, and its landing in 2021, there is no better time to capitalize on engineering and science in the news. This mission is…

Leadership gurus often put creating a "shared vision" at the top of their pyramid of what successful leaders do. These visions are best when they are an anchor or a North Star -- unwavering goals that the district works toward. Author Jon Saphier proposes this North Star for districts: Make every school an engine for continuous…

A qualitative content analysis was employed to examine what factors contributed to effective teachers' selection and retention in urban high poverty schools. First, the Star Teacher Interview was used to identify effective urban educators. Then, verbal interviews were conducted with star subjects to determine factors that contributed to their…

Investigating stars can be difficult. The five-day unit presented in this article is designed for fifth graders to work toward Next Generation Science Standard (NGSS) performance expectation 5-ESS1-1, with each lesson lasting about 30 minutes. Students investigate the relationship between the brightness of light and distance, apply their…

A classic TV commercial once asked, "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop?" The narrator claims, "The world may never know" (Tootsie Roll 2012), but an Internet search returns a multitude of answers, some of which include rigorous systematic approaches by academics to address the…

Data from the Kepler satellite were analysed using the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes database. With the participation of 53 students, we determined the parameters of the HAT-P-7b (Kepler-2) exoplanet system (transit duration, planet-to-star radius ratio, orbital period, semi-major axis and star mass). We used approaches that are easy to…

We investigated to what extent secondary school students have insight in the apparent motion of the Sun and stars (AMoSS). We used the AMoSS test instrument, which focuses on distinctions between different aspects of the apparent motion of the Sun and stars. It consists of 12 multiple-choice questions accompanied by explanations. We administered…

The report is about the effectiveness of the YoungStar system which provides consumers with a simple 5 Star rating system for the quality of early care and education (ECE) programs for children ages 0 to 5. It also explores what was learned from a recent research study of YoungStar, Wisconsin's child care quality rating and improvement system. The…

Background: Participating in research opportunities during undergraduate education is met with myriad benefits. Students learn the scientific research process, how to think critically, develop transferable skills, refine public speaking, build a professional network, and gain confidence. Despite the numerous benefits of undergraduate research…

This paper reflects on the classroom use of the "Star Trek" American science fiction television franchise to teach critical and emotional geographies to undergraduates specializing in science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM). Both science fiction and STEM education are ambivalent and contradictory scenes of social…

The typical sound of George Lucas' laser blaster in the "Star Wars" series is well known. What does a laser blaster in "Star Wars" sound like, and why? Here we show a simple way to produce this sound by using low-cost lab material, like a spring or a Slinky. Building on the work of Crawford, who analyzed the sound of a Slinky…

This study investigates the interpretive approaches of three English teachers working in different grade levels with the same poem, Walt Whitman's "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer." The researcher sought to learn what the teachers identified as most valuable about studying poetry in school, what interpretive approaches they employed…

In this study, it is aimed to reveal the models related to star subject as one of the concepts of astronomy of prospective science teachers before and after the current instruction through model analysis. This modeling situation is expressed as a Grounded Mental Model (GMM), since there will be a mental modeling that is revealed according to what…