Teaching Tools

We invite you to explore our selection of free high-quality teaching tools, a curated set of outstanding materials previously produced by others to support the explicit teaching of how the scientific community produces reliable knowledge. 

These contain a mix of in-class activities and out-of-class references to aid student learning, and they represent some of the best resources we could find for teaching how science works and why evidence-based judgments are more credible than a simple belief.

Our goal is to allow teachers to quickly and effectively sample a series of outstanding teaching materials before committing their valuable time to any of them.

The materials cover essential topics, including those on the list below. Click on each link for a brief introduction to a valuable resource, plus a sampler: an excerpt on the topic described.

We have also collected assessments that teachers can use to query student understandings, which are located here.

• Making curricula maximally accessible for busy teachers
• Teaching scientific thinking
• Teaching that science often involves making inferences that are based on circumstantial evidence: “Mystery boxes”
• Teaching how science produces evidence through experiments
• Teaching how science can explore questions about the past, without experiments 
• Teaching the difference between those questions that can and cannot be addressed by science
• Teaching even 5 year-olds how to argue productively, like scientists
• Teaching the critical role of peer review in science
• Teaching how scientists determine the safety of medical treatments through clinical trials
• Teaching why the textbook description of science is much too simple.
• Teaching how new scientific tools and techniques advance science 
• Teaching that science can sometimes produce a major change in how we view the world
• Teaching how to distinguish misinformation from science
• A resource for teaching how scientists traced infectious diseases to microbes