School is out, but what better time to review your lesson plans? Are there concepts that your students don’t understand despite your best efforts?

The American Institute of Physics created a list of common misconceptions that children (and even adults) have about scientific phenomena. Here’s a few of them: “The solar system is very crowded”, “The pupil of the eye is a black object or spot on the surface of the eye.”, “Gases do not have mass.” or “Heat is a substance.”

In How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, edited by John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, one method of dispelling these strongly held misconceptions is by “bridging students’ correct beliefs (called anchoring conceptions) to their misconceptions through a series of intermediate analogous situations.”

Simulations, interactives and multimedia resources found online provide a dynamic method for bridging student knowledge by helping to build constructs of understanding. Choosing the right resource involves examining the nature of these representations and real-world phenomena and whether they enhance or hinder the learning process.

Enter Phenomena and Representations for the Instruction of Science in Middle Schools or PRISMS Project of the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance (MMSA) designed to make searching for conceptual representations and real phenomena easier and more accessible. This website will be featured on the June 19^th NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar. Registration for this seminar is free.

PRISMS, developed with the help of middle school science teachers, provides feedback on resources with annotations related to the learning concepts addressed, strengths of the resource, and ways to augment the resource for more effective teaching and learning. These annotations address key questions that aid and instruct teachers on how to select resources with grade level appropriate vocabulary, ones that allow for the inclusion or exclusion of additional text to gradually build comprehension, as well as define if the resource truly addresses the intended learning goals in mind.