<p>Can you tell me what a Science Research Class would cover in high school? We are a home schooling family, with students very interested in science, and I would like to learn more about what this course might cover-- is it on laboratory techniques? Science paper writing skills? Journal research? Any particularly textbooks used? Thanks for any input!</p>
<p>I've never heard of a Science Research class in high school. In fact, I've never heard of any class that teaches you how to do research.</p>
<p>Really? Well in my school, once you do Bio you have to take a research class. Once in 10th you can apply for an advanced research class. Since I am an exclusion I will take science research next year since I am in Earth Science in the 9th grade =[</p>
<p>If you're homeschooling, I would think it'd be hard to offer such a class with a limited budget. Our science research class doesn't use a textbook, but that's because our instructor, a PhD, wrote up a ton of protocols he used when he worked at a local cancer research center. </p>
<p>I think a literature review (journal research) is a critical aspect of research and should be emphasized far more than it is emphasized now. Maybe I'm a bit biased since I readily have lab materials in my high school lab, but if you're on a low budget I think that writing skills and journal research should be emphasized first.</p>
<p>Thanks for all the comments. We live close to a large Regenerative Medicine facility so the children have access to mentors and labs, so now I am trying to organize their effort toward proper "science research" skills. I will definitely begin the review of literature (Scientific American, Science, and other magazines) and try to have them develop a sustainable hypothesis/experiement through a few years of work... Very interesting!</p>
<p>You may also want to try to find any databases that have actual scientific journal articles. These are usually available through either your town library's website, or even through the local public school, if you have access to either of those. In my research class at school, we start off by picking out things we are interested, and finding out more about these topics from magazines(Scientific American, etc)/online sources. Once we find the specific topic we are interested in we move on to actual journal articles, which are much more advanced and are hard to understand at first. After we know our topic extremely thoroughly, we begin to look for mentors. Usually they are contacted by email, and give us either a yes or a no. Even with a "no," they are sometimes very helpful and will give names of other scientists that we may be able to work with. Once we have a mentor we either conduct research with them, or they supervise our own research. When we are finished with our research we write a paper and prepare a powerpoint and present at various competitions. We also have a symposium at school to show off the Seniors presentations at the end of each year.</p>
<p>Sorry for the long response, but I hope it helps!</p>
<p>PubMed (<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/%5B/url%5D">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/</a>) is also a great place to get free abstracts. However, you'll need to subscribe to journals to access entire articles.</p>
<p>haha, at my old high school they had social sci and science research classes....solely made for the purpose of giving kids a better chance at intel.</p>