CILT99 Posters

Visualization and Modeling

Simulations as Bridging Scaffolds for Intuitive Conceptions

Doug Clark & Marcia Linn
http://wise.berkeley.edu/WISE/demos/13probe

"Probing Your Surroundings" expands Clement's idea of bridging analogies using simulations to facilitate student construction of intermediate bridging scaffolds between normative instructed models and the intuitive experiential models. The project is based on WISE Internet software with custom simulation modeling, electronic peer critique, and laboratory components integrated to support students as they investigate thermal equilibrium. The project has already been piloted with 300 students in the Bay Area and will be translated at the University of Oslo for implementation in Norway via Internet next year. Students build strong intuitive conceptions and models around their experiences that overshadow normative models instructed in school. Our simulation promotes students' construction of useful connections between these elements of their conceptual ecologies.

The Achieving High Academic Standards Project (AHAS)

William Conrad
Submitted by: Zaritsky, Conrad, Munroe & Rudy

Based upon the experiences in the Collaboratory Visualization Program (CoVis, Pea & Gomez), it had become clear that building multi-page goal based scenarios via the web as explanation for the sciences like atmospheric science could be accomplished with web-based materials. However in focus groups it became clear that students misunderstood the meaning of a front in a weather map leading them to believe that the factor of change was the front rather than the front was a representation of the changes in the air masses. To the question why did it get cold in Chicago, students answered correctly, because the cold front passed through. And then elaborated further to explain that the cold front chills the air as it passes through. These initial results convinced the first author that students needed to work at a deeper level where they could develop ideas about the engines of change in a system.

The Achieving High Academic Standards (AHAS) Project is a student based collaborative inquiry project that partners for resources and professional development eight school districts across the state of Illinois with the North Central Regional Education Laboratory (NCREL) and the National Computational Science Alliance (NCSA). This collaborative group seeks to determine whether infusing concept organization and visualization software such as Stella and Model-It into schools with high percentages of low-income students, bilingual students, special education students, and mobility rates will improve 6th grade students' abilities to access and achieve math benchmarks related to data collection, representation, and interpretation. This project also seeks to identify successful staff development interventions that will assist low technology skilled teachers in effectively using math visualization software with students. In sum, the project is working in over seventy classrooms in eight school districts and three private schools.

Emergent structures for conversations and communities: Helping students visualize where a discussion is going

Alex Cuthbert, Jim Slotta, Marcia Linn
http://islandia.berkeley.edu/coolsystem
http://wise.berkeley.edu

Innovation is not always the result of a mathematical dream about snakes eating their tails. More often innovation comes from applying accepted approaches to novel situations and gaining insights from how things work (or fail to work, as the case may be). The techniques presented here contribute to the field of educational research by refining advances in engineering design environments and applying them to communities of learners. The particular processes we chose to emphasize rely on the visualization of convergence within discussions. Helping students recognize and reconcile different perspectives on a problem has been a challenge in both engineering (Conklin, 1988; Nagy, Ullman, & Dietterich, 1992) and education (Scardemalia & Berieter, 1991). Creating visualizations that represent the trajectory of a discussion can help turn emergent goals into resources that can support future action (Guindon, 1990).

One of the most important innovations in our community system is that we do not specify the structure of conversations beforehand. Rather, the comments that students make enable certain actions and alternative representations. If students are debating a theory, a representation highlighting the two sides of the theory may emerge with condensed text or links pointing to supporting evidence. If students are working on a design project, different design decisions and rationales might appear with the most important factors percolating to the top of the discussion. The challenge met by this approach is to help students decompose the problem without obscuring the larger idea being developed. The benefit for students using dynamically reconfigured discussion environments is that the representations are aligned with the processes and activities they support. By creating visualizations that reflect the process of negotiation, students are able to see which comments are credible to their peers. These productive comments should be engaged more frequently and, we expect, comments like them will appear more often.

Supporting Lifelong Learning for New Elementary Science Teachers

Elizabeth Davis

Elementary teachers face enormous challenges in teaching science. New teachers develop facility with the rhetoric of education, but often have limited understanding of how to implement innovative teaching strategies like guiding students' scientific inquiry. New teachers also have not yet developed a collection of curriculum materials to support those innovative teaching strategies. I intend to investigate these challenges further and to develop prototype approaches to educative curriculum that educates the teachers as well as the students. I hope to increase new elementary teachers' confidence and ability in teaching science, so that elementary children have more productive experiences learning science. I plan to do this through developing a framework for educative curriculum that focuses on improving teachers' (a) understanding of teaching science for understanding as well as their (b) content knowledge in science and (c) knowledge of students' existing scientific ideas.

Since many elementary teachers feel more confident teaching life science than physical science, I plan to develop curriculum to teach about physical science topics through the Trojan horse of the human senses. In the context of activities focused on the sense of touch, for instance, students can explore phenomena like thermal equilibrium, insulation and conduction, and heat flow.

At the CILT conference, I hope to identify partners with whom to collaborate on the technology component of this work. Though elementary science activities should have a large hands-on component, technology should also play a role. Besides delivering curriculum and scaffolding reflection, technology can provide powerful tools, including simulations and models, that make students' and experts' thinking visible and promote conceptual understanding. Because this project is aimed at teacher learning, too, I also hope to identify an environment to support teacher reflection, provide opportunities for teachers to make their own thinking visible, and foster social supports to further teachers'learning.

A New Technology for Teaching Math Problem-Solving

Rob Foshay
http://www.plato.com

PLATO(R) Education has developed a new product architecture for teaching problem-solving in moderately-structured domains. The architecture uses an innovative combination of game and intelligent coaching technologies. Original research and development work was partially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The architecture's first application is in PLATO Math Problem-Solving, a curriculum of 19 authentic math problem-solving simulations which integrate into the PLATO math curricula. The product is designed to support either solo study or collaborative learning, and includes supports for guide on the side instructor interaction. The architecture represents one of the first large-scale commercial applications of research on learning of problem-solving, and intelligent tutoring technologies. Products using the architecture can be developed cost-effectively due to substantial advances in the instructional design methodology and automated authoring tool set used..

Developing An Expository Model To Assess Animated Science Visual Representations

Carlos Garcia

The study of visual information developed by students learning science, especially as it relates to animated models, is challenging because the researcher has to assess for representation of information (science content), the operations identified with the creation of an animated model (user interface), and variables that affect representational outcomes (real classroom concerns). The purpose of this presentation is to explore the usefulness of an expository model in the assessment of children's learning of science content through the use of animation software. The expository model is a criterion that includes the evaluation of spatial/temporal relations; the development of an operational unit; types of processing related to decomposition; types of processing related to the establishment of parameters; types of processing related to connections between nature and theory; and types of processing related to retrieval. These measures allow the classification of a particular representation as being tight, average or loose. The idea is to have a way of assessing animated science models while raising questions about possible reasons for particular visual outcomes. The presentation will explain in detail these categories given their role in the assessment of science content via a dynamic visual system.

Barry Goldman

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Science & Technology Education Program facilitates internships which support the long-term manpower and core-competency needs of the national security-related programs within LLNL and DOE Defense Programs. Students, teachers, and faculty are placed within research areas that cover a spectrum of topics from: * High Performance Computing (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative), * Actinide Chemistry (Seaborg Institute), * Military Academic Research Associates (MARA) and the ROTC, and * Lasers, optics, and crystal growth (National Ignition Facility). Although most of these programs are for upper level undergraduates, students in community colleges may qualify as they complete their sophomore year and should learn of these opportunities as they schedule their upper level undergraduate years.

Enhancing and Representing Free Choice in Informal Science Learning Environments

Robert Lebeau

Science museums and centers are popular resources for teachers and students. Often, however, school group visits to such institutions are isolated and self-contained experiences in which many learning opportunities are unrealized. This presentation discusses a research project in which we sought to influence participants' goal-setting as part of visits to a science center. We did so by designing a new science center map that students receive prior to a visit, and by encouraging particular pre-visit and post-visit planning and reflection in conjunction with map use. We now intend to enhance and integrate these reflective and representational processes through the use of learning technologies..In the pilot study, we compared self-reports of attitudes and behaviors among students who were given just the map, and those who were given the map plus suggested activities for setting selective goals for a visit. Students in the "map + activity" group demonstrated a trend toward a greater readiness to seek help from center staff when encountering difficulties in understanding. All students indicated shifts in their attitudes toward science learning. Students appeared to find the format of the map, as a consistent part of both pre- and post-visit planning, to be a good foundation for drawing together their experiences and planning for subsequent activity.

The project as a whole centered on concrete representations of the free choices learners make, or intend to make, in informal learning environments. These representations can serve self-instructional goals, teacher documentation of student learning and interests, and as a measure of the nature and quality of learner engagement with science center resources. As such, they provide structural support for the self-direction, social mediation, and free choice characteristic of informal learning. We are eager to further explore with CILT participants how the use of learning technologies can enhance these processes in this context.

The Progress Portfolio: Tools to promote reflective inquiry with visually-oriented investigation environments

Ben Loh
http://www.ls.sesp.nwu.edu/sible/

Computer-based learning environments provide unprecedented opportunities for scientific inquiry using large databases and sophisticated simulation and analytical tools. But these complex environments also create new challenges for students, who often become performance-oriented, lost in the activities of doing inquiry. This problem is compounded by the addition of computer technologies that encourage browsing. Rather than blindly forging ahead in their investigations, students need to be reflective inquirers, to periodically step back to document and monitor their progress, review their understanding and conclusions, and communicate their understanding to others. We have designed software, called the Progress Portfolio, to help students reflect on the inquiry process as they construct artifacts that represent the progress of their investigations. It provides tools to document these otherwise invisible processes: capturing states of work, documenting thoughts, observations, direction and purpose with annotation tools, organizing work through data management tools, and communicating the products of investigation through presentation tools. These inscriptions of the work process provide tangible artifacts for learning about the process of inquiry through self-reflection and social discourse. Additionally, teachers can customize the Progress Portfolio with structured workspaces and prompts to support their own ideas about what is important for inquiry.

In collaboration with CILT partners, we are interested in further pursuit of an important research agenda: a better understanding of the kinds of inquiry projects and learning environments for which the Progress Portfolio is ideally suited. With design features that include the easy capture, organization, and annotation of images from the Internet or data visualization programs, we believe that the Progress Portfolio is well suited for projects.typical of visualization and modeling curricula. By collaborating with developers of such curricula and tools, we can continue to learn how best to support reflective inquiry.

Visualization Tools for Inquiry-Based Classrooms

Harold McWilliams
http://www.terc.edu , http://www.wri.org/enved/datascap.html

Since 1994, TERC has been involved with GIS and other visualization technologies. Research indicates that four factors condition the implementation of these technologies in K-12 education: appropriate hardware and software, accessible and appropriate data, curriculum integration, and teacher professional development. TERC has been involved with the creation of two recent visualization products, Visual Earth (from TERC) and DataScape (from World Resources Institute and ESRI). Visual Earth is a multimedia application designed around the Map Objects LT library of GIS functionality. DataScape is based on ArcView 3.0/3.1. This demo/presentation will present the technical and interface design innovations of these two products, compare the two approaches taken, discuss the technical and philosophical differences reflected in the products, and outline a research strategy to study the actual use of such visualization products in K-12 classrooms.

A CIA approach to conceptual change in science education

Alireza Rezaei

Three groups were studied in this project. The first group comprising 48 students was the control group (CG group) which received one month conventional physics instruction. The second group comprising 39 students is called the radical constructivist group (RC group) which received a 3-hour individualized computer assisted instruction based on radical constructivist approach. The third group comprising 56 students is called the Inventive group (IN group) which received a 3-hour individualized computer assisted instruction based on the Inventive Model explained (Rezaei, Katz, 1998). Two Physics tests were used in this study: the knowledge test, and the conceptual test (Fore Concept Inventory, FCI, Hestenes, 1998). The same tests were used for the post-tests. The results showed that group 1 (the control group) scored significantly higher on both the knowledge pretest and the conceptual pretest. However, group 3 (the Inventive Model group) scored significantly higher than the other groups on the conceptual posttest. Group 1 scored significantly higher than other groups on the Knowledge posttest. Regarding the time efficacy, the Inventive Model was 5 times more effective than the conventional approach.

The effectiveness of each teaching method on individual items was also considered in this study. In summary the results showed that the Inventive Model had positive effectson almost all items of the conceptual test. However, the radical constructivist approach has different effects on different items. It was also observed that the Radical constructivist approach and the conventional instruction had negative effects on some conceptual items..Finally the analysis of students' log files showed that most of students had visited most of their assigned pages and had answered most of their assigned questions. However, their first answers to most questions, were mainly incorrect. The results also showed that students spent more time on answering short time questions than the multiple choice ones and that Hint and Help buttons were rarely used by students.

Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project

Michael Simkins
http://pblmm.k12.ca.us

Begun in 1995, the Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project is an innovative program that harnesses the power of multimedia to engage students in challenging learning activities. Students complete projects that draw on real-world information and research methods-and design them as sophisticated multimedia presentations. Students learn course work and technology skills in a way that also fosters valuable workplace competencies such as teamwork, communication, planning and problem solving. Students display their work at Project-sponsored multimedia fairs.

Teachers build on what they do well, learn new practices and develop exemplary educational experiences for all students. Multimedia Project teachers establish a peer learning community in which they gradually take on responsibility for planning and conducting their own professional development. Veteran teachers share their skills with less experienced colleagues. The Project provides support in the form of on-site mentors, training workshops, mini-grants for equipment and supplies, more time for planning, and on-line resources and networking opportunities.

Results

An initial portrait and assessment of the Challenge 2000 Multimedia Project is found in Transforming Teaching and Learning with Multimedia Technology, a report prepared by staff at SRI International. The report highlights positive changes in classroom practices as well as describing the challenges the project faces in moving forward. The Multimedia Project is a program of Challenge 2000, a broad school reform effort sponsored by Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, in collaboration with San Mateo County Office of Education. The Multimedia Project is one of the U.S. Department of Education Technology Innovation Challenge Grants.

BGuILE: Teachers, students and materials interacting to construct biological knowledge

Iris Tabak
http://www.ls.sesp.nwu.edu/bguile

BGuILE learning environments bring scientific inquiry into middle school science and high school biology classrooms. The environments consist of computer-based scenarios and associated classroom activities in which students conduct authentic scientific investigations. Students explain phenomena such as animal behavior and evolution - why lion hunts succeed or fail, how some finches are able to survive while their population is decimated, or how strains of Tuberculosis are resistant to antibiotics. The learning environment supports students' progression through a cycle of investigation. Students choose variables on which to focus, construct comparisons, interpret and synthesize results. They construct, evaluate and revise explanations, and respond to critiques from classmates. Students explore a myriad of data: qualitative behavioral data through video and text, quantitative morphological data through graphs, and simulated results of in-vitro experiments. Teachers in the BGuILE classroom augment and reinforce the supports in the computer environments. Teachers encourage students to consider alternative hypotheses, debate investigation strategies, and challenge interpretations. One focus of our research concerns how to provide support for student-directed investigations. We combine general inquiry support with biology-specific support. General analysis support encourages students to construct comparisons and annotate data with interpretations. Specific support helps students look for biological patterns, such as individual variation and relating structure to function, as well as organize data into biological evidence categories. General support for explanation construction encourages students to tie evidence to each claim. Specific support helps students articulate explanations that are consistent with canonical biological explanations.

A second research theme examines how teachers enact inquiry projects. We examine how teachers create a climate conducive to scientific inquiry, how they frame and structure tasks to communicate expectations and values, and how they provide ongoing support as students conduct their investigations. Design research focuses on creating technological supports for these effective teaching practices.

eeZone TEXAS: Exploring Interdisciplinary Environmental Issues via the Internet

Arthur VanderVeen
http://www.eezone.net

eeZone TEXAS is a 6-12 grade Internet-based learning program that uses interdisciplinary environmental education issues to teach students problem solving skills and systems thinking. eeZone was developed for the Texas Education Agency as part of a 1998 Technology Integration in Education grant awarded to a cooperative group of rural school districts and Bricolage Interactive. eeZone Texas currently hosts landfill, litter and graffiti projects. Each of these eeZone projects engages students collaboratively in authentic real-world investigations of environmental issues relevant to the local community. The eeZone website provides students and teachers with the learning tools.necessary to explore the relationships among social and scientific systems inherent in complex environmental issues. The eeZone Landfill project facilitates students' collaborative investigation of solid wastes streams at their school and within a "planned community" proposal in order to calculate solid waste management needs and propose a plan for siting a landfill. Using a GIS map viewer, students also explore a set digital topographic maps to determine potential ground water contamination concerns. The eeZone Graffiti Project challenges students to understand different points of views and health hazards associated with graffiti. Using interactive databases, students are able to quickly identify relationships between toxic chemical exposure rates and lifelong health impacts. Finally the eeZone Litter project help students gather data on litter behaviors around their school campus in order to propose and evaluate various litter control policies. Using CAD based software, students create a digital map of their campus and enter data into an on-line database with the aide of drag-and-drop icons that record the location and amount of litter. At the completion of all eeZone projects, students use their authentic research to make real recommendations for changes in their local community and to actively impact their local environment. The eeZone projects are currently being used by over 2,000 students and are expected to involve another 60,000 students by the year 2000.