There is an increasing gap between the assumptions governing the use of cyber-enabled resources in schools and the realities of their use by students in out of school settings. The potential of information and communications technologies (ICT) as cognitive tools for engaging students in scientific inquiry and enhancing teacher learning is explored. A comprehensive professional development program of over 240 hours, along with follow-up is used to determine how teachers can be supported to use ICT tools effectively in classroom instruction to create meaningful learning experiences for students, reducing the gap between formal and informal learning and improve student learning outcomes. In the first year, six teachers from school districts - two in Utah and one in New York - are educated to become teacher leaders and advisors. Then three cohorts of 30 teachers matched by characteristics are provided professional development and field test units over two years in a delayed-treatment design. Biologists from Utah State University and New York College of Technology develop four modules that meet the science standards for both states - the first being changes in the environment. Teachers are guided to develop additional modules. The key technological resource to be used in the project is the Opensimulator 3D application Server (OpenSim), an open source, modular, expandable platform used to create simulated 3D spaces with customizable terrain, weather and physics. 

The research methodology includes the use of the classroom observations using RTOP and Technology Use in Science Instruction (TUSI), selected interviews of teachers and students and validated assessments of student learning. Evaluation, by an external evaluator, assesses the quality of the professional development and the quality of the cyber-enabled learning resources, as well as reviews the research design and implementation. An Advisory Board will monitor the project. 

The project is to determine the professional development needed to make teachers comfortable teaching with multi-user simulations and communications that students use everyday. The enactment with OpenSim also provides an opportunity to demonstrate the level of planning and preparation that go into fashioning modules with all selected cyber-enabled cognitive tools framed by constructivism, such as GoogleEarth and Biologica.

This project conducts interdisciplinary research to advance understanding of embodied learning as it applies to STEM topics across a range of current technology-based learning environments (e.g., desktop simulations, interactive whiteboards, and 3D interactive environments). The project builds on extensive research, including prior work of the PIs, regarding both embodied learning and statistical learning. The PIs describe embodied learning as engaging the neuromuscular systems of learners as they interact with the world around them visually, aurally, and kinesthetically in order to construct new knowledge structures. Statistical learning is described as the ability to learn, often without intent, which sequences of stimuli are consistent with a set of rules. An example of statistical learning is pattern recognition, which is central to mastery of complex topics in many STEM disciplines including physics and mathematics.

The project has two central research questions: How are student knowledge gains impacted by the degree of embodied learning and to what extent do the affordances of different technology-based learning environments constrain or support embodied learning for STEM topics? To investigate these questions, the PIs are conducting three series of experiments in five phases using two physics topics. The first four phases are developmental and the final phase implements and assesses the two modules in schools (20 plus teachers, 700 plus K-12 students) in Arizona and New York (15 total sites, 10 plus public schools, minimum one Title I school).

The aim of this project is to meld these two research trajectories to yield two key outcomes: 1) basic research regarding embodiment and statistical learning that can be applied to create powerful STEM learning experiences, and 2) the realization of exemplary models and principles to aid curriculum and technology designers in creating learning scenarios that take into account the level of embodiment that a given learning environment affords. 

Dealing with the world's most pressing problems requires an ability to understand and reason about causal complexity. For instance, understanding topics such as ecosystems and global warming involves reasoning about non-obvious causes, spatial gaps, temporal delays, cyclic causality, and distributed causality where the agency/intentionality of one's actions is on a different level than those of the emergent outcomes. The focus of this project is on how children learn to reason about complex causality and how that reasoning can be stimulated and taught in classrooms. The literature on child development suggests that children are capable of understanding complex causal concepts to a greater extent than earlier research suggested. Yet, paradoxically, students' misconceptions in science have been linked to students' difficulties reasoning about complex causality. This study explores how children learn to reason when provided with activities and materials that support three types of reasoning: distributed causality, probabilistic causality, and action at a distance. By conducting and videotaping close interviews at multiple points in the school year with small numbers of students in grades K-6 (the microgenetic phase), the study will characterize children's reasoning at different ages and how it shifts over time and with different learning supports. It will consider the contexts of biology, mechanical reasoning, social reasoning, and games. Classroom-level interventions will then be introduced and studied. In the last year of the project, using what was learned about children's reasoning and how to support it, ecosystems and global warming curriculum units will be designed and tested in middle school classrooms.

The Inquiry Project is a partnership between teachers, TERC and Tufts University. The project builds an understanding of science in grades 3–5 that lays a foundation for students’ later understanding of matter in terms of molecules and atoms. The Inquiry Project focuses on material, weight, volume, density and related ideas that we know are important and challenging for today’s students. Unique characteristics of this work are the integration of mathematics and science content, and the focus on inquiry through investigation.

The Inquiry Project brings research, curriculum, assessment, and professional development together in one coherent system with each components vital to preparing learners for this challenging learning progression.

What understanding do students develop and why is this important?

Inquiry is central to science learning. As described in the National Science Education Standards (NRC, 1996), a classroom having the essential features of inquiry is one in which learners:

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The Inquiry Project curriculum is designed with these features in mind, and with three content-specific dimensions of inquiry: measurement of matter, change and conservation, and scale.

Measurement of matter

Many middle school students can calculate density as the ratio of mass to volume, but lack a deeper intuitive sense that density is related to number of particles within a specific volume and the mass of those particles. In The Inquiry Project, students learn to measure weight and volume using a variety of methods and use their measurements as evidence to support explanations. They begin to understand that all matter (in solid, liquid, or gaseous form) has weight and volume. With a firm grasp of the measurement of weight and volume, students are able to build mental models of matter and density that will help them understand the particulate nature of matter later on.

Conservation and Transformation

The Inquiry Project helps students deepen their understanding of matter and materials through investigations of what changes and what stays the same when matter changes state, is reshaped, divided, heated, and mixed. In these investigations students need to isolate variables that are important to their investigations and control their experimentation to measure these variables. They use their measurements and their emerging models of matter to understand that some quantities, such as the total mass of a system, do not change.

Scale

Students build an intuitive sense of scale of space (volume), weight, and density that will later assist them in developing a particulate model of matter. Moving from macroscopic to microscopic thinking requires the ability to construct mental models about things and processes we cannot observe. Students who gain a strong understanding of quantities of volume, weight, and density through observation, measurement, and modeling are poised to understand quantities and phenomena at a scale that they cannot observe.

 The Children's Measurement Project examines children's developing knowledge from PreKindergarten through Grade 5 as they develop the capacity and strategies they need to measure geometric space (length, area and volume), investigating number concepts, early algebra, or variability. We investigate ways children learn to use measures as evidence for scientific or mathematical claims. We began by examining the literature on learning trajectories and progressions to interpret existing research on children's understanding of length, area and volume. Our work engages both Rasch modeling and learning/teaching experiments within clinical and classroom contexts to collect data for longitudinal accounts of children's development of measurement concepts and strategies. The work is being conducted as a collaboration of Illinois State University and the University at Buffalo (State University of New York). We are beginning the fourth year of our project (2010).