1999 Seed Grants
Title: Representing Scientific Strategies
Visually
PI's: Bat Sheva Eylon, Weizmann Institute, Israel;
Iris Tabak, UCLA
Other collaborating institutions: University of
California, Berkeley
Scientific innovations increasingly permeate our lives. Communities
must vote on policies for water fluoridation, and parents must
decide whether their children should be immunized with newly
introduced vaccines. Acquiring a corpus of scientific knowledge is
not sufficient for cultivating scientifically literate citizens.
They must be able to gather, analyze and synthesize scientific
information in service of decision making. National standards
consistently call for students' understanding of scientific
strategies and procedures. The Representing Scientific
Strategies Visually project will identify inquiry strategies
common to scientific practice, and create multiple representations
of these strategies suitable for varied instructional
approaches.
This research draws on earlier work by the participating partners
(Bat Sheva Eylon, Iris Tabak, and Marcia C. Linn) designing inquiry
support tools and curricula that reify productive investigation
strategies. The work is also informed by a number of extant
projects (e.g., WISE, BGuILE, CLP, KIDS, ModelIt, One Sky Many
Voices, Progress Portfolio, ThinkerTools) designing supports for
scientific practices. Visualization tools can be designed to
suggest ways in which to manipulate, juxtapose and depict
scientific information. In addition, they can communicate the
relevance of such actions for specific scientific projects, and
encourage generalization, abstraction and reuse. Our proposed
partnership will identify a set of strategy representations that
could be implemented across different learning environments.
Final Report
Title: Modeling Malaria: An interactive tool for
exploring science controversy
PI: Margaret Corbit, Cornell University
Other collaborating institutions: University of
Washington; University of California, Berkeley; Interactive
Learning Design
The Modeling Malaria (MM) project is a collaboration involving the
Science Controversies On-Line: Partnerships in Education (SCOPE),
funded through the KDI initiative of the NSF, and Cornell Theory
Center (CTC). The content features simulation models from Cornell
mathematician Rick Durrett and will incorporate game design
concepts in its final stages. This partnership enables experts in
technology, science disciplines, pedagogy, and classroom use of
learning environments to jointly design a prototype, interactive
simulation and to extract from the work a plan for broad expansion
of the approach. The MM project will leverage leading-edge research
in computer modeling to contribute new and useful tools based on
current research that can be used by students and lifelong learners
to examine controversial areas of research from a scientific
perspective. Our goal is to learn how to design and present such a
tool so that it easily can be incorporated into the SCOPE
environment, specifically SCOPE's first Controversy Forum on
malaria. We also will examine how use it in an informal learning
environment (SciCentr), identifying a set of design criteria for
both. We will contribute our findings to CILT's efforts to create a
taxonomy of learning technology resources.
Final
Report
Title: Roadmap for Modeling and Visualization in
Learning: A linked national graduate seminar
PI: Kenneth Hay, University of Georgia
Other collaborating institutions: University of
California, Berkeley
The goal of this proposal will be to establish a networked
collection of graduate seminars on Modeling and Visualization in
Learning (MVL) at universities across the world in the Spring
Semester of 2000. These seminars would have the primary objectives
of:
- Establishing a scholarly community around the MVL Theme Team
objectives
- Negotiating a common vocabulary and intellectual framework for
MVL
- Developing a "road map" for research and development of
MVL
- Developing the next generation scholars in MVL
These linked seminars would be significant in several ways. There
are many exciting and revolutionary projects and examples of
modeling and visualization throughout the world. However, basic
framework and agreed-upon definitions are lacking. A series of
linked seminars will provide a means for a scholarly group to read
a common corpus of seminal articles in the area of MVL, to interact
with the primary authors of these works through telecommunications,
and to facilitate sustained interactions between scholars and
graduate learners. This synergistic approach could rapidly develop
the field's collective knowledge.
Seed Grant Products: The MVL Web site.
Title: VisuAlliance - Integration and innovative
assessment of dynamic visualization components in the classroom
PI: Eric Hilfer, TERC
Other collaborating institutions: Logal Software,
Inc.; SRI International
(co-sponsored by the Assessments for Learning Theme Team)
The Visualization and Modeling Theme Team at the CILT99 conference
identified two vital directions of inquiry that needed attention
and research: The integration of existing visualization and
simulation tools into a flexible delivery environment, and Updating
assessment and evaluation methods to capture the ways these
innovative environments influence and contribute to learning. We
propose to form a partnership to investigate the integration of two
powerful data visualization systems, TERC's
VideoScapeª linked video and measurement tools and
Logal¨ Software's SimPlayerª
component-based Web delivery visualization environment. We further
propose to work with SRI International to build upon their current
work in developing new methods of assessment and evaluation of
learning with innovative visualization and simulation. We would use
the Seed Grant to fund the development of a preliminary standard
specification for a visualization integration platform, and use
VideoScape and SimPlayer in particular as a test case for
demonstrating integration. Evaluation and assessment models will be
concurrently developed to address all of the features supported by
the integration standard. These assessment models will be as
media-rich and flexible as the learning environment itself. The
results of these studies will then be used as major components of a
larger federal grant application.
Final Report
Project website: http://projects.terc.edu/VisuAlliance
Title: Technical and Theoretical Foundations of
Learning Activities with Modeling
PI: Clayton Lewis, University of Colorado at
Boulder
Other collaborating institutions: MIT; School
District 15, Palatine, IL; Stagecast; University of Missouri,
Kansas City; University of California, Berkeley; Georgia Institute
of Technology; Harvard University; FamiliarTales, Inc.; University
of Georgia; SRI International; NCSA
People developing and studying learning activities centered on
modeling need better access to information about available software
tools, and to evolving theoretical ideas about learning with
models. At the same time, tool builders and theorists can profit
from greater knowledge about proposed and actual learning
activities and experience with them. We propose to develop
sharable, expandable information structures to meet these needs,
providing an organized way for users, tool builders, and theorists
to collect and exchange information and ideas. Using these
information structures, a person developing a model-based learning
activity could identify available software tools and determine how
well these tools could support the planned activity, at what level
of effort. He or she could also locate ideas in the evolving theory
of learning with models applicable to the planned activities.
Later, descriptions of the experience with the new activity would
be added to the information structures. This new information would
provide feedback to theorists and tool builders, leading to
improved theoretical ideas and better tools.
The final workshop report is posted here: http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~clayton/ciltwk.html
Title: Designing Knowledge Representations and
Epistemic Practices for Science Learning
PI: William Sandoval, UCLA
Other collaborating institutions: University of
Washington; SRI International; University of Hawaii; University of
California, Berkeley
This project is an effort to consolidate what we know as a field
about designing representations for scientific knowledge that
support students' inquiry in productive and epistemologically
appropriate ways. Our work is being carried out in two phases.
During the first phase we will synthesize results from our own
efforts and comprehensively review other representational tools.
This synthesis and review will include what we have learned about
the particular affordances of different tools to support
explanation, model building, and argumentation, including both
representational and discursive practices. Such a review will
clarify theoretical issues involved in supporting flexible use of
representations which have varying epistemological and rhetorical
affordances, and will be submitted to an appropriate journal, such
as Review of Educational Research. The second phase builds upon
this review to articulate a set of design principles for the next
generation of tools capable of enabling students to represent their
emerging scientific understanding in various ways and at multiple
levels. This design work extends beyond simply understanding how to
design technology to include designs for certain kinds of practices
associated with effective instructional uses of these
representations, namely scientifically appropriate epistemic
practices. These design principles will then inform our development
of the next generation of representational tools and instructional
practices within our ongoing classroom-based research and design
efforts.
Final Report