About the Science Reasoning Resource CD

UPDATE: We have postponed this project due to the urgency of several others. We hope to resume work on it in the near future. Sorry. 
TPC
7/17/2019


A Resource CD is currently being prepared to accompany this section of the website. The Resource CD will provide teachers with an even wider repertoire of tools for cultivating and assessing science reasoning skills. The CD will provide a teacher of physics with a bank of passages and questions similar to the smaller selection available here on the website. While the passages on this website typically are accompanied by 8-12 questions, the passages on the CD contain considerably more questions. The additional questions provide a teacher an opportunity to customize an activity for their own students or to simply use a selection of questions for an in-class activity and to use a different selection of questions for an at-home activity. Additionally, there are approximately twice as many passages on the CD compared to the number of passages present here on the website. With extra passages and extra questions, the CD makes the online Science Reasoning Center look like the tip of the iceberg. Equipping teachers with more questions and more passages gives them more flexibility and more choices regarding how they cultivate science reasoning skills within their curriculum. All this content - the additional questions and the additional passages - is present as Microsoft Word files and thus is fully editable and customizable.

The Resource CD also contains answers and explanations for all passages - both the passages on this website as well as the additional passages present only on the CD. The explanations are thorough and complete; they are written in a language that a student would likely understand. The user agreement accompanying the Resource CD allows teachers the right to print and duplicate hard copy versions of the documents for their students and to place the electronic documents on password-protected websites that are assessable by their students (but not by the general public).

To most effectively use this resource, it is important that a teacher provide students with questions that are at their specific reasoning level as well as questions that stretch them towards higher reasoning levels. For this reason, each question in every passage is coded to a specific science reasoning level. The science reasoning standards used by The Physics Classroom's Science Reasoning Center are the College Readiness Standards published by the ACT Corporation. This linking of questions within every passage to specific science reasoning standards allows teachers to intelligently craft passages with questions that meet students where they're at and stretch students to where they need to be.

Finally, each passage is accompanied by tips and usage suggestions, links to related information, and (where applicable) Microsoft Excel spreadsheet files that were used as sources of the data that were included in each passage. The Excel files were designed with the end user in mind. Columns are labeled and input parameters are clearly identified so as to make them easily modifiable. With minimal knowledge of Microsoft Excel, a teacher could easily modify the spreadsheets and create new data for use in a passage, an assignment, or even a quiz or test.

The Resource CD is currently under production. Once complete, it will provide a physics teacher with a repertoire of tools for cultivating and assessing science reasoning skills. It is projected that the CD will be completed sometime during the Fall or Winter of 2014.

Contents of Resource CD:

The table below provides a rough estimate of the contents of the CD. Since it is currently a work in progress, the details are subject to change.