Middle School Teacher’s Reflection Essay on Time in Lab – click here. This internship was made possible by Participant Support Funds from a grant from the National Science Foundation MCB 1817985.
Amherst Regional Middle School Teachers Develop Curriculum in coordination with the Vierling Lab
Middle school efforts are supported by the NSF grants:
National Science Foundation – MCB 1517046
7/15/15-7/14/2019 $682,357
“Linking Reactive Nitrogen Metabolism and Redox Homeostasis in Plants”
National Science Foundation – MCB 1817985
8/01/18- 7/31/22 $800,000
“Regulating Nitric Oxide Homeostasis and its Impact on Plant Growth and Reproduction”
For the past three summers Amherst Regional Middle School (ARMS) teacher, Elliott Kelly was involved directly in research addressing aims of Vierling’s NSF parent grant, along with developing curricular material for the middle school classroom. The research in which he participated, as well as the experiments he designed for the classroom, supports the content described in the Next Generation Science Standards: MS -LS3 Heredity – Inheritance and Variation of Traits, and MS -LS4 Biological Evolution – Unity and Diversity. This summer ARMS science and math teacher Jodi Stevens joined Elliott and continued the curriculum and lab work.
Please follow this link to see the great work Jodi and Elliott did:
https://sites.google.com/arps.org/plants-ms-science/home
Their website includes two sets of experiments, a description of the classroom growing system and other ideas for further study.
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Elliott Kelly in the news:
Daily Hampshire Gazette: Saturday, August 26, 2017
Norman Price, Amherst Regional Middle School seventh-grade science teacher, left, looks on as eighth-grade science teacher Elliott Kelly measures Arabidopsis seedlings Aug. 25, 2017 while demonstrating a plant experiment he perfected this summer working with biologists at UMass Amherst as part of a National Science Foundation grant. The middle school’s science teachers will run the experiment with students this fall.