Inquiry experiences can provide valuable opportunities for students to improve their understanding of both science content and scientific practices. However, the implementation of inquiry learning in classrooms presents a number of significant challenges. We have been exploring these challenges through a program of research on the use of scientific visualization technologies to support inquiry-based learning in the geosciences. In this paper, we describe five significant challenges to implementing inquiry-based learning and present strategies for addressing them through the design of technology and curriculum. We present a design history covering four generations of software and curriculum to show how these challenges arise in classrooms and how the design strategies respond to them. Students at all grade levels and in every domain of science should have the opportunity to use scientific inquiry and develop the ability to think and act in ways associated with inquiry...(National Scie...

This paper describes how an argument representation tool called SenseMaker has been used to promote science learning with middle school science students during a debate activity. The argumentation tool is one component of the Knowledge Integration Environment (KIE) Internet-based learning suite for science education. The argument representations make student thinking visible during individual and collaborative activities in the classroom. The paper elaborates on how the cognitive mechanisms and learning goals shaped the design of the SenseMaker software and presents results from several formative classroom trials of the tool. Student arguments vary based on their epistemological beliefs about the nature of science. Students report using the SenseMaker tool to support both individual and collaborative learning during their classroom projects. Keywords—argument-building, classroom debate, conceptual change instruction, knowledge representation tools, Internet, science education SenseMaker Rationale The Web continues to become more ubiquitous in our culture and our schools. Many metaphors have been used to better understand the Web’s role in education, including thinking of it as a library or as an on-line textbook. Although these metaphors may be appropriate for subsets of Web resources, the approach taken by this research is to view the Web as a whole as “evidence”— where students can be actively engaged in interpreting, critiquing, and constructing arguments using these information resources. Over the past three years, the KIE project has taken this approach to build a framework for Internet-based curriculum and custom software tools. The design of KIE has been shaped by cognitive research performed within classroom settings. How can students best be supported (or scaffolded) when engaging in the construction of arguments using scientific evidence from the Web? What do students learn from engaging in such activities? A number of software development efforts—including CSILE (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991), the Multimedia

Research on "epistemological beliefs " has made important contributions to education, most fundamentally in identifying epistemology as a category of informal knowledge that may play a role in students ' knowledge, reasoning, study strategies, and participation. A perspective on students as having epistemological beliefs can provide an alternative interpretive lens for

This article explores how students ’ epistemological ideas about the nature of science interact with their conceptual understanding of a particular domain, as reflected in written explanations for an event of natural selection constructed by groups of high school students through a technology-supported curriculum about evolution. Analyses intended to disentangle conceptual and epistemic aspects of explanation reveal that groups sought plausible causal accounts of observed data, and were sensitive to the need for causal coherence, while articulating explanations consistent with the theory of natural selection. Groups often failed to explicitly cite data to support key claims, however, both because of difficulty in interpreting data and because they did not seem to see explicit evidence as crucial to an explanation. These findings reveal that students have productive epistemic resources to bring to bear during inquiry, but highlight the need for an epistemic discourse around student-generated artifacts to deepen both the conceptual and epistemological understanding students may develop through inquiry. Inquiry-based approaches to science education emphasize processes of inquiry, such as asking questions, generating and interpreting data, and forming conclusions

This paper presents initial findings from our collaborative effort to understand the roles various kinds of scientific representations play in supporting students' epistemological learning in science, through their development of epistemic practices. We present concrete design principles for the development of representational tools that support students' inquiry and their development of scientific epistemic practices; and we sketch a framework for using such tools to support students' collaborative inquiry, both face-to-face and online. These principles elucidate what we have learned about the ways in which representational tools support students' articulation of their knowledge, evaluation and negotiation of those ideas with their peers, collaboration around the knowledge representations, and instructional practices that support such complex forms of inquiry. We first present a general overview of our meaning of epistemic practices and general design principles to promote them. Subsequent sections briefly describe how our various research efforts instantiate these design principles within knowledge representations and activities designed to guide students' use of these representations. EPISTEMIC PRACTICES IN SCIENCE

This paper describes part of a project called Modeling Across the Curriculum which is a largescale research study in 15 schools across the United States. The specific data presented and discussed here in this paper is based on BioLogica, a hypermodel, interactive environment for learning genetics, which was implemented in multiple classes in eight high schools. BioLogica activities, data logging, and assessments were refined across this series of implementations. All students took a genetics content knowledge pre- and posttests. Traces of students ’ actions and responses to computer-based tasks were electronically collected (via a “log file ” function) and systematically analyzed. An intensive 3-day field test involving 24 middle school students served to refine methods and create narrative profiles of students ’ learning experiences, outcomes, and interactions with BioLogica. We report on one high school implementation and the field test as self-contained studies to document the changes and the outcomes at different phases of development. A discussion of design changes concludes this paper. KEY WORDS: genetics; model-based learning; interactive environments; data logging; technologyenhanced assessment. With support from NSF, the Concord Consortium developed an interactive, computer-based learning environment, BioLogica, that is designed to support students in high school classrooms to build a deep understanding of core concepts in Mendelian genetics. The pedagogical challenges are numerous. What do we mean by deep understanding? How can we help them develop deep understanding? How do we know when they’ve done so? This paper focuses on the learning that takes place when students use BioLogica, an interactive genetics curriculum, in their high

While engineering programs must continue to cover the maximum breadth and depth of content information possible, these programs can also take an active role in encouraging and fostering additional dispositions to help their graduates adapt to their professional career. We define an adaptive expert as an individual who possesses the content knowledge of an expert, but who in addition displays specific cognitive dispositions that augment and enhance their ability to effectively utilize and extend their content knowledge. We have identified four main constructs (multiple perspectives, metacognition, goals and beliefs, and epistemology) which form the foundation of adaptive expertise. We report on a survey developed to measure these qualities of adaptiveness in three target engineering populations (freshmen, senior, and faculty). We also present preliminary interview data conducted in conjunction with the survey to provide insight as to how this adaptiveness is manifest in undergraduate engineering students.

Conducting observational investigations of behaviors and processes is an important method for gen-erating scientific knowledge. This paper describes a methodology for assisting students in the processes of observational inquiry and theory articulation and its instantiation in a set of digital video tools. We describe a high school biology curriculum where students use these tools to investigate video clips of animal behavior and develop theories about how and why these behaviors evolved. We focus our discus-sion on an investigation model that scaffolds students through the processes of observing and explaining video as data and the computational and curricular supports that were designed to make these processes explicit. We conclude with a presentation of preliminary results to illustrate the types of explanations that emerged from working with the software and curriculum and a discussion of issues that emerged during the course of the research.

The research presented in this paper is part of a large-scale design study conducted in demographically diverse classrooms with software that is under development. BioLogica, a hypermodel environment for learning genetics, was used in multiple classes in eight high schools. BioLogica activities, data logging, and assessments were refined across this series of implementations. All students took a genetics content knowledge pre- and post-test and completed epistemological and experiential surveys. Traces of students ’ actions and responses to computer-based tasks were electronically collected (via a “log file ” function) and systematically analyzed. An intensive three-day field test involving twenty-four middle school students served to refine methods and create narrative profiles of students ’ learning experiences, outcomes, and interactions with BioLogica. Since BioLogica activities, the instruments used to assess learning, and data logging capabilities changed over the course of the year, we report on two high school implementations and the field test as self-contained studies to document the changes and the outcomes at different phases of development.

Inferential power and barriers to understanding i