this paper is to provide a clear link between the theoretical principles of constructivism and the practice of instructional design and the practice of teaching. We will begin with a basic characterization of constructivism identifying what we believe to be the central principles in learning and understanding. We will then identify and elaborate on eight instructional principles for the design of a constructivist learning environment. Finally, we will exam what we consider to be one of the best exemplars of a constructivist learning environment -- Problem Based Learning as described by Barrows (1985, 1986, 1992) at the Southern Illinois University Medical School and at the Problem Based Learning Institute for high school teachers .

Traditional activities change in surprising ways when computermediated communication becomes a component of the activity system. In this descriptive study, we leverage two perspectives on social activity to understand the experiences of individuals who became active collaborators in Wikipedia, a prolific, cooperatively-authored online encyclopedia. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a lens for understanding participation in a community as an adaptable process that evolves over time. We use ideas from activity theory as a framework to describe our results. Finally, we describe how activity on the Wikipedia stands in striking contrast to traditional publishing and suggests a new paradigm for collaborative systems.

In order to learn effectively, a reasoner must not only possess knowledge about the world and be able to improve that knowledge, but it also must introspectively reason about how it performs a given task and what particular pieces of knowledge it needs to improve its performance at the current task. Introspection requires declarative representations of meta-knowledge of the reasoning performed by the system during the performance task, of the system's knowledge, and of the organization of this knowledge. This paper presents a taxonomy of possible reasoning failures that can occur during a performance task, declarative representations of these failures, and associations between failures and particular learning strategies. The theory is based on Meta-XPs, which are explanation structures that help the system identify failure types, formulate learning goals, and choose appropriate learning strategies in order to avoid similar mistakes in the future. The theory is implemented in a ...

this paper, I present: . Definitions of scaffolding and software-realized scaffolding; . A description of Emile as an instance of a computer-based learning environment designed to provide software-realized scaffolding; . The setting for the evaluation of Emile, data collected, and analysis methods used; and . The results, discussion, and my conclusions.

To be successful, CSCL technology must be adopted by teachers and incorporated into the activities of the classroom. This paper describes a comprehensive approach to supporting teachers learning to implement computer-supported collaborative inquiry in their classrooms. The approach comprises (1) a networked software system, “Belvedere, ” that provides students with shared workspaces for coordinating and recording their collaboration in scientific inquiry; (2) activity plans worked out collaboratively with teachers; (3) “challenge problems ” and Web-based materials designed to match and enrich the curriculum, and (4) self- and peer-assessment instruments given to students to guide the process of scientific inquiry. A fundamental aim of this work is to restructure the classroom and shift the initiative for learning activity to the students.

Abstract: A major technological concern of our work is to improve the cost effectiveness, reusability, and interoperability of advanced educational software. To make these technologies viable, we must be able to add component functionality incrementally, and enable systems to interoperate with commercial software and internet resources. We have designing and implemented an architecture that places shared resources and “heavyweight ” functionality on servers, and uses Java and Netscape to deliver student interfaces on a wide variety of client platforms at any location with internet access. This paper describes the architecture at five levels of description. Its strengths and weaknesses provide a case study in how to improve the deployability and interoperability of knowledge-based educational software without sacrificing advanced functionality. 1.

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

In our research, we start with a constructivist belief in the importance of an active learner interacting with a variety of resources, developing his or her own understanding through a mixture of experimentation, experience and expert guidance. However, we supplement this constructivist outlook with a sociocultural commitment to the impportance of communication and collaboration with other learners throughout the knowledge construction process. In this paper, we describe a learning environment that we have developed that combines constructivist-inspired tools for open-ended investigation with communication and collaboration tools that support both expert guidance and multi-learner collaboration.

To develop lifelong learning skills, we argue that students need to learn how to learn via inquiry and understand the sociocognitive and metacognitive processes that are involved. We illustrate how software could play a central role in enabling students to develop such expertise. Our hypothesis is that sociocognitive systems, such as those needed for collaborative inquiry and reflective learning, can best be understood as a community of interacting agents, who each have expertise in accomplishing particular high-level goals. We introduce a system, named SCI-WISE, that houses a community of software agents, such as a Planner, a Collaborator, and an Assessor. The agents give strategic advice and guide students as they undertake collaborative research projects and as they reflect on and revise their inquiry processes. Students can easily modify SCI-WISE so that it expresses their own theories of how to do inquiry and how best to coach and scaffold the process. We describe curricular activities in which middle school students use SCI-WISE to engage in “inquiry about inquiry, ” thereby making inquiry and metacognition topics of investigation. Finally, we discuss how such activities should lead to improvements in their inquiry learning skills as well as to their metacognitive development in general.

The importance of both social processes and of representational aids for learning is well-established, yet few experimental studies have addressed the combination of these factors. The research reported in this article evaluates the influence of tools for constructing representations of evidential models on collaborative learning processes and outcomes. Pairs of participants worked with 1 of 3 representations (Graph, Matrix, Text) while investigating complex science and public health problems. Dependent measures included (a) the content of participants ’ utterances and representational actions and the timing of these utterances and actions with respect to the availability of information; (b) a multiple choice test of the ability to recall the data, hypotheses, and evidential relations explored; and (c) the contents of a written essay. The results Do Not Copy show that representational notations can have significant effects on learners ’ interac-tions, and may differ in their influence on subsequent collaborative use of the knowledge being manipulated. For example, Graph and Matrix users elaborated on previously represented information more than Text users. Representation and discussion of evidential relations was quantitatively greatest for Matrix users as predicted, yet this came at the cost of excessive consideration and revision of unimportant relations. Graph users may have been more focused in their consideration of evidence, and the work done in the Graph representation had the greatest impact on the contents of the essays. Although limited to initial use of representations in a laboratory setting, the work demonstrates that representational guidance of collaborative learning is worthy of study and suggests several lines of further investigation.