The Physics Classroom Science Reasoning Center

Coming This Fall - Science Reasoning Center, Version 2

Version 2 of our Science Reasoning Center will be released in August of 2023. The newest version will be interactive (not just a bunch of PDFs), offer immediate feedback to students' answers, offer multiple opportunities for correction, and be Task Tracker compatible. Furthermore, the new version will consist of a collection of NGSS-inspired activities that lie at the intersection of a Disciplinary Core Idea, a Science and Engineering Practice, and a Cross-Cutting Concept. Plans are currently under way. The back-end programming is nearly complete. And we should have some content available for preview and usage beginning in late-April or early-May of 2023.

Caution

We have broken ground on our new project - the Science Reasoning Center project. Version 2 is now under construction. Please pardon our pixel dust.

While we make drastic changes to this section, we have preserved the Legacy Version for your continued viewing. You can access all files here until August 1, 2023. At that time or shortly thereafter, all Legacy Versions of the Science Reasoning Center will likely be replaced by the updated version.

The Science Reasoning Center provides teachers with a collection of teacher-friendly and classroom-ready activities for cultivating and assessing students' ability to reason scientifically. The activities are interactive experiences in which information is presented to the student. The information must be evaluated, interpreted, and synthesized in order to accurately respond to questions and other tasks presented in the interactive.

Many of our activities are remakes of Version 1 of the Science Reasoning Center. As such, they engage students in tasks that fall into the broad categories of interpreting data, analyzing experiments, and evaluating models and theories. Other activities that are unique to Version 2 are NGSS-inspired. They engage students in tasks that require the application of a science and engineering practice, an understanding of a science concept that cuts across all disciplines of science, and some knowledge of a core physics (and chemistry) idea.

Topics

Version 2 entered the construction phase in April of 2023. As such, the topic pages below are rather bare. Templates and database programming were completed in the latter half of May. Activities will be completed and posted on the site throughout the months of June, July and August. We will provide links to activities once they are completed. You can always get the latest news on development at our What's New at TPC? page. (Looking for Version 1? Find it here.)

NGSS Activities (1 activity currently available)

1-D Kinematics (3 activities currently available)

Newton's Laws (2 activities currently available)

Projectiles (1 activity currently available)

Momentum

Energy (1 activity currently available)

Waves (1 activity currently available)