Dick was an award-winning professor of science education at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He began his career as a middle-school biology teacher and progressed to a district science coordinator. He became a the writer of a popular series of textbooks as he obtained his doctorate in education from Columbia University.  He is was the co-author of a seminal article about children’s thinking in science “Teaching for Conceptual Change” published in the 1990 Phi Delta Kappan magazine, which is still being used in college classrooms throughout the U.S.  

 

After retiring from the University, Dick began to write the Everyday Science Mystery series (Everyday Science Mysteries (2008), More Everyday Science Mysteries (2009), Even More Science Mysteries (2010), Yet More Science Mysteries (2011) and then collaborated with S. Page Keeley on a college text Teaching for Conceptual Understanding in Science (2015). He worked with his wife Kathleen to write two illustrated children’s books – From Flower to Fruit (2016)  and Beaks of Birds (2018).  Dick died tragically and suddenly in 2019 but three books will be published posthumously.