I went to a demonstration that Lab-Aids conducted at the Science Teacher Association of New York State (STANYS) conference and really liked what I saw, so I tried the lessons with my students and found that they were both engaging and effective for teaching.
The students interact with the content personally, rather than through lecture or rote memorization. They are able to learn the content through stories that they can connect with. The lesson plans are very clear, well done, and teaching with them is fun.
Students are collaborating in small groups though reading circles, lab planning, experimenting, and they are developing arguments for their ideas that amazingly connect to the evidence they collected in their experiments. They developed their experiments, so they actually understand what they are doing and why.
Issues and Science has integrated the engineering component into the lessons seamlessly with the storyline that each book focuses on. The books also weaves the NGSS language into the passages and questions. The students are incorporating the language of these standards into their responses and we are using them regularly without feeling forced.
My students are writing more thoughtful responses in their notebooks to each science phenomena than they did using my previous lessons. They are encouraged to make connections to many units of science at once, and their arguments allow for me to identify misconceptions that I didn't previously see in my teaching so we can have really valuable class discussions to deepen their level of learning.