What real science is about

Imagine teaching the latest science on the same day it appears in the newspapers.

Imagine the kick the kids will get when they say to their parents watching the news on TV: “We did that in school today. It’s like this ....”

We get information from sources around the world, sift it to find newsworthy nuggets, then turn these into free teaching and learning resources that grab young people’s interest and hold their attention.

We devise activities that develop understanding, support groupwork and guide pupils to explore the issues – scientific, ethical, environmental – raised by the latest science news.

We provide links to free resources, activities and lesson plans for teachers and online activities for children and young people.

Here’s how it works:

The aim of this site is to make science accessible and interesting to young people by combining up-to-the-minute research news with the interactivity of the Web.

The latest story, adapted to be readable by kids aged 11 upwards, appears on the News page. Hyperlinks are included to webpages that elucidate, educate, entertain or shed further light on topics that appear in the story. As far as possible these contain animations, illustrations, video, photographs or audio – multimedia to make for a more interactive reader experience.

Words can be a major barrier to anyone trying to read about science. Scientific terms often have meanings that are subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, different to their everyday meanings. And writers about science, even when they don't use specifically scientific terms, often reach automatically for long words that are hard for young people to understand.

So we enhance the readability of our science news stories through another interactive feature. Student-friendly meanings for hard words and scientific terms are provided in a little box that appears when the cursor is placed over a word. This is called a mouseover.

Try it with the final word in the paragraph you’ve just read. Place the cursor over it and you should see “text that appears next to the cursor when it hovers over certain places on a webpage”.

The science news story is followed by a set of comprehension questions that guide students to engage with steadily more difficult ideas. Internal links are provided, especially for the earlier questions, pointing the reader to the place in the text where an answer can be found. The browser Back button will then return the reader to the question.

All this is designed to be used by students without much in the way of teacher intervention. The second set of activities on the Discussion page are designed to be more teacher-led, and contain suggestions for engaging students with the science in the story through group discussions, research or preparing presentations. Cooperative learning is recommended to structure these activities. ("Cooperative learning is group work, but group work is not necessarily cooperative learning.")

Suggested activities on the discussion page will often contain links to relevant resources from some of the growing number of great websites that provide free educational science activities.

On the discussion page we also provide a tip for science teachers who want to tackle cooperative learning or group work in class and are looking for a little guidance. This will be taken either from the research literature or from the classroom experience of real science teachers.

Discussion topics are derived from the story by analysing the text, a method that is explored and explained in Topics from text. The additional classroom activities in this section are valuable exercises in themselves, enabling students to get at the details of a story, the science it contains and the nature of science itself.

Identifying the different types of statement - new discoveries, methods used, existing knowledge, issues and implications, hypotheses, evidence etc - is an exercise that can be done quite quickly. But young people will have different ideas about how to classify the statements – indeed quite often so will teachers and scientists themselves.

Class and group discussions to reach some kind of consensus can then enable the students to explain, explore and improve their understanding - of the real science and its implications.

So after all that, what is the latest news in real science?