Science Teaching Reconsidered is a practical handbook designed for college teachers who want to explore new ways to enhance student learning. The handbook draws on the knowledge of teachers and scientists with extensive experiences in the natural sciences and a keen interest in effective science teaching. This handbook is designed especially for new faculty members and graduate teaching assistants, but is intended to be useful to anyone interested in teaching undergraduate science, whether it be in a research university, liberal arts college, or community college.

How often do all of us ask ourselves: What do I want students to learn from this course? What are they actually learning? What mix of factual information and conceptual understanding best serves my students' needs? How do I decide which teaching methods work best for my students? How do I measure student learning? This handbook is designed to help you find answers to such questions.

Effective science instruction is an art involving creativity, imagination, and innovation, along with planning, practice, decision making, and evaluation. Teaching is a scholarly activity, benefiting from research, collective experience, and critical thinking throughout. Yet with all the demands on our time we seldom have an opportunity to think through the entire process. This handbook should help you to review some basic principles underlying current issues in science education, to think about how you might assess your own teaching, and to design ways to increase its effectiveness.

Science Teaching Reconsidered does not focus on scientific course content. Rather, it provides information about successful teaching practices in a variety of science courses. It offers you an overview of current research in undergraduate science education and some practical guidelines for experimenting with and changing the ways you teach. While we believe that the chapters are closely related, we have tried to design each chapter to stand alone so that they may be read in any order. The references and related on-line database listings have been chosen to provide more details about the teaching and learning processes discussed; the list is by no means comprehensive.

Some readers may want more scholarly depth, but please keep in mind that this handbook is a practical guide to help busy teachers learn about and try new ways to enhance student learning. Continued engagement with these issues may lead you to regular perusal of disciplinary or interdisciplinary journals and/or to participation in local, professional, or electronic discussion groups. Sources listed in the appendices are a good starting point for further study.

The committee expresses its deep gratitude to the hundreds of teachers, from dozens of colleges and universities, who were crucial to the assessment and substantial revisions of two early versions of this handbook. Not only was much of your advice heeded, your obvious dedication to good teaching was inspiring.