[To appear in K. Tobin & B. Fraser (1997), International Handbook of Science Education ,Kluwer, Dordrecht, NL.]

Realising Authentic Science Learning through the Adaptation of

Scientific Practice

DANIEL C. EDELSON

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

ABSTRACT. Current theories hold that authentic learning activities are the key to developing

understanding that will serve learners beyond the classroom. Adapting the practices of science to

classrooms can provide the benefits of authenticity for science learning. However, in adapting

science practice for learning environments, it is important to retain not just the tools and

techniques, but the attitudes and social interactions that characterise science practice. Technology

can play an important role in supporting authentic scientific activity in the classroom through

scientific and communications tools that are adapted for learners. However, attention to new

curriculum structures and teacher support are also essential. In this chapter, I explore these issues

through a case study of the CoVis Project and a discussion of the common themes that underlie a

number of projects that are investigating the use of technology to support more authentic science

practices in science classrooms.

1.0 INTRODUCTION

Making science learning better resemble science practice has been a common goal among

education reformers at least since Dewey (1964). The potential benefits are clear. Students

become active learners, they acquire scientific knowledge in a meaningful context, and they

develop styles of inquiry and communication that will help them to be effective life-long learners.

As appealing as this goal may be, it has unfortunately remained difficult to achieve in practice.

However, the increasing availability of computer and networking technologies for the classroom,

as well as the growing role of these technologies in science practice itself, offers new opportunities

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for the successful adaptation of scientific practice for learning environments. Specifically,

technology can place a greater range of tools and resources at the disposal of teachers and students,

and it can increase the opportunities for the social interchange that is at the heart of authentic

science practice.

In this chapter, I discuss the adaptation of scientific practices for the classroom to achieve the

benefits of authenticity. The first section contains a discussion of authentic science practice and the

major challenges of adapting science practice for education. The second section presents a case

study of the CoVis Project, an ongoing research and development effort using technology to assist

the adaptation and implementation of scientific practice for learning. The final section describes a

number of closely related projects that are exploring a variety of ways to use technology to bring

authenticity to the classroom.

2.0 AUTHENTICITY

In a modern echo of Dewey’s (1964) recommendations, authenticity has become a rallying

cry for innovation in education. Following on the work of Brown, Collins, & Duguid (1989) who

argued, ‘Authentic activity...is important for learners, because it is the only way they gain access

to the standpoint that enables practitioners to act meaningfully and purposefully’ (p. 36), numerous

educational researchers have adopted authenticity as a crucial objective for learning. The reason

authentic settings are important, and the reason authenticity is receiving so much attention is the

recognition that the knowledge and skills that learning activities produce are tied to the situation in

which they are learned. For many topics taught in schools and universities, researchers have

uncovered a great deal of discouraging evidence showing that students are often unable to

meaningfully apply the knowledge they acquire in school (e.g., Caramazza, McCloskey & Green

1981; Halloun & Hestenes 1985). This inability to apply knowledge in real-world settings has

been attributed to the situated nature of knowledge (Brown, Collins & Duguid 1989). When

individuals learn, they use the features of the situation in which they learn something to index the

knowledge in their memories so that they may access that knowledge in the future (Schank 1982).

If the indices in the learner’s memory are too specific, then knowledge becomes situated too

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strongly within the setting in which it was learned, and it will not be applied in other settings. If

the learning context accurately reflects the context in which the new understanding will be useful,

however, then the situated nature of the learning will benefit the learner and enable him or her to

recognize opportunities to apply the learning.

2.1 Characteristics of Authentic Science Practice

In adapting science practice to the classroom, it is seductively easy to focus on scientific

knowledge, tools, and techniques at the expense of other elements of scientific practice. However,

scientists’ attitudes and their social interactions are also defining features of scientific practice. For

students, understanding these attitudes and interactions is essential in order to understand the

scientific process and to interpret the products of science. The key features of scientific practice

fall into three categories: attitudes, tools and techniques, and social interaction.

Attitudes

Scientific practice is characterised by the attitudes of uncertainty and commitment:

• Uncertainty: Science is the pursuit of unanswered questions. By nature, both the

techniques and results of scientific inquiry are subject to continual re-examination.

• Commitment: Scientists pursue issues that are important to them for a wide variety of

reasons. Regardless of the particular reasons, effective science practice is always

characterised by a commitment on the part of the scientists to the questions they are

attempting to resolve.

Any translation of scientific practice into educational settings must encourage these attitudes

in order to provide authenticity. Therefore students must have the opportunity to adopt questions

that represent true uncertainty in their world. To foster commitment among students, the questions

they pursue must have ramifications that are meaningful within the value systems of these students.

Tools and Techniques

The practice of science in any modern discipline includes a set of tools and techniques that

have been developed and refined over the history of the field. These tools and techniques permit

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scientists to pose and investigate a range of questions. The fact that these practices are shared

across a community of scientists establishes a shared context that facilitates communication within

the community.

Social Interaction

Science is not just investigation. It includes the sharing of results, concerns, and questions

among a community of scientists. This interaction has the same mix of co-operation and

competition, agreement and argumentation that accompanies all human social activity.

For scientists, their attitudes, tools, techniques, and social interaction are all supported by a

body of knowledge that provides a meaningful context for scientific activity. The goal of

providing students with the means to engage in adapted scientific practice is to enable them to

acquire a body of scientific knowledge that is integrated with an understanding of science

knowledge, attitudes, tools, techniques, and social interaction. The successful adaptation of

scientific practice for learning will place the tools and techniques of scientists into the hands of

students in a context that reflects the characteristics of science practice outlined above. A vision of

learning that integrates these features of scientific practice has students investigating open questions

about which they are genuinely concerned, using methods that parallel those of scientists.

Throughout the process, they are engaged in active interchange with others who share their

interest. Just as scientists accumulate knowledge and understanding through the course of posing

and investigating research questions, students will too. Before engaging in any investigations,

students will need to accumulate enough knowledge to pose well-framed questions. In the course

of conducting investigations, they will need to master the tools and techniques that allow them to

generate and analyse meaningful data. Finally, to be able to work with others, they must develop a

vocabulary and framework for their understanding that allows them to communicate clearly about

the knowledge they acquire. The result of these learning activities will be student knowledge that

is firmly situated in a context that reinforces both the applicability and value of that knowledge.

While emphasising the importance of having students engage in activities that resemble those of

scientists, it is important to acknowledge the significant differences that necessarily distinguish the

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practices of learners from those of scientists. The adapted scientific activities for students must

reflect the vastly different interests, background knowledge, and motivations of the two

dramatically different populations.

2.2 Adapting Scientific Practice to Learning

The vision of students learning science by engaging in science is hardly new. However, it

has been notoriously difficult to implement. Often the problem has been an incomplete

implementation of the features described above. For example, traditional laboratory activities are

intended to give students the opportunity to employ authentic scientific tools and techniques.

However, the design of laboratory experiments usually removes any uncertainty, does little to

obtain student commitment, and places minimal importance on social interaction.

Any complete adaptation of scientific practice will need to address three primary issues: 1)

curriculum structure, 2) teacher preparation, and 3) learner-appropriate resources, tools and

techniques. The challenge in addressing these issues is achieving authenticity within the practical

constraints of the classroom environment. Current, fixed curricula present a significant obstacle to

the use of authentic scientific practice in the classroom, because of the flexibility in time and topic

required for students to wrestle with uncertainty and pursue issues to which they are personally

committed. Traditional training for teachers has not prepared them for new roles in which they

must engage students in uncertain science, help them to formulate and refine research questions,

identify resources and tools that will allow them to expand their understanding, and foster authentic

scientific debate. Providing scientific resources, tools, and techniques for use by students requires

the modification of facilities designed for expert scientific practitioners to allow students to ask

questions and pursue them in ways that are similar to those of scientists.

3.0 THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY: A CASE STUDY

Technology has an important role to play in addressing these challenges, particularly in the

adaptation of resources, tools, and techniques for students. In this section, I discuss The Learning

Through Collaborative Visualization (CoVis) Project, a research project at Northwestern

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University that is capitalising on advanced technologies in an effort to provide characteristics of

authentic science practice for students (Edelson, Pea & Gomez 1996; Pea 1993). In addition to

focusing on technology development, this project, along with others discussed in the next section,

is confronting the issues of curriculum structure, teacher preparation, and the adaptation of

resources, tools and techniques.

The CoVis Project’s objective is to use advanced computing and communications

technologies to support innovative high school science education. In its technological design and

development, CoVis has focused on two types of tools for students: scientific visualisation tools

and communication and collaboration tools. In its approach to pedagogy, the project has focused

on project-enhanced (Ruopp, Gal, Drayton, et al. 1993) and project-based (Blumenfeld, Soloway,

Marx, et al. 1991) science learning. The project has specialised in earth and environmental

science. In the 1993-94 and 1994-95 school years, the first two years of implementation, two high

schools with six teachers and nearly 300 students participated in CoVis each year. In the 1995-

1996 school year, approximately 40 middle and high schools throughout the U.S are participating

in the project.

3.1 Curriculum Structures

The CoVis Project does not provide teachers with a fixed curriculum or a required set of

activities. Instead it presents them with a set of resources and technologies. Participating teachers

are encouraged to organise their courses around project cycles, but the duration, structures, and

topics of these projects are left to the discretion of the individual teachers. For example, project

cycles in CoVis classes have varied from a few days to a half a year. In some classes the structure

and topic of projects have been specified in advance by the teacher, and in others they are left to the

choice of the students. The final product and the standards of evaluation are also left to the

discretion of the teacher. The CoVis project’s role is to assist teachers to set these parameters for

their classes in an informed way and to provide them with access to supporting resources.

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Beginning with the 1995-96 school year, the CoVis project is providing teachers with a

resource guide containing a collection of inquiry-based activities. This guide does not constitute a

curriculum per se, but rather provides a starting point for teachers in their development of

classroom activities. The resource guide is distributed to teachers in a print form and is also

available through the CoVis Geosciences Server, a world-wide web site maintained by the CoVis

project. The activities included in the resource guide range from highly-structured, traditional labs

to suggested topics for open-ended investigations. The goal is to provide teachers and students

with a range of activities that will allow them to migrate from the practices that they are familiar and

comfortable with, to less-structured, more authentic activities. Some of these activities are CoVis

Inter-school Activities (CIA’s) which, are scheduled, co-ordinated activities involving communities

of schools. These CIA’s follow in the model of the Global Lab (Berenfeld 1993; TERC 1991) and

Kids as Global Scientist (Songer this volume) projects discussed in the next section.

3.2 Teacher Preparation

The teacher development activities in the CoVis project are conducted with the goal of helping

teachers to improve their confidence and abilities in facilitating the inquiry process on the part of

their students. This requires flexibility, comfort with non-traditional teacher roles, familiarity with

available resources and tools and an ability to monitor and assess the needs of their students. Since

teachers are the richest source of available expertise on how to manage inquiry-oriented

classrooms, most of the teacher development activities are aimed at the establishment of a

community of teachers for the exchange of ideas, experiences, and strategies. Communications

technologies play a central role in creating and maintaining this community of teachers. Through a

combination of face-to-face workshops and electronic communications, CoVis teachers engage in

discussions of pedagogy and practice.

3.3 Adaptation of Resources, Tools and Techniques

In its adaptation of scientific resources, tools, and techniques the CoVis project has focused

on computational tools, specifically tools for scientific visualisation and for collaboration.

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Scientific visualisation refers to a set of display techniques used by scientists for the analysis

of data (Brodie, Carpenter, Earnshaw, et al. 1992). A scientific visualisation is an image or

animation in which numeric values in data sets are represented visually as colors, shapes, or

symbols. By exploiting the mapping between visual representations and underlying data values,

scientists are able to discover important properties of the data through the observation of visual

patterns in images. Because visualisation makes it possible to interpret data through visual

perception rather than numerical analysis, it offers the potential for an impact on science education

that is comparable to the enormous impact it has had on many scientific disciplines in the last

decade.

The primary challenge in adapting scientific visualisation for learning stems from the fact

that current scientific visualisation tools have been designed for use by researchers. When a

scientist uses a scientific visualisation tool to investigate a body of data, he or she draws upon a

rich store of knowledge about scientific phenomena, the source and limitations of the data and the

central questions of the field. In order to take advantage of visualisation as a means for learning

through inquiry, students must be able to use scientific visualisation tools without possessing the

background knowledge of a scientist. On the other hand, their use of the tool should enable them

to acquire a meaningful portion of that scientific knowledge. In short, the goal of the adaptation

process is to take a tool that scientists use to extend human knowledge about a subject and

transform it into a tool that a learner can use in a similar way in order to extend his or her personal

knowledge about that subject.

Three visualisation environments, called visualizers, have been developed using this

process. They cover three aspects of atmospheric science and are called the Weather Visualizer,

the Climate Visualizer, and the Greenhouse Effect Visualizer. Each of these is built on top of a

visualisation tool used by researchers and provides learners with a more structured and more

supportive user interface than the scientists’ tool.

The Weather Visualizer (Fishman & D’Amico 1994) is an interface to current weather data

for the United States. It enables students to view satellite images, weather maps displaying

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graphical symbols describing local atmospheric conditions, and false-colour images showing

meteorological variables such as temperature, wind speed and direction, atmospheric pressure, and

dew point. Students use the Weather Visualizer to conduct ‘nowcasts’ and forecasts in ways that

are similar to the daily activities of researchers in meteorology and to conduct research into

weather-related topics. For example, one student used archived weather maps as part of an

investigation of the conditions that led to disastrous wild fires in the Los Angeles area in 1993.

Like the Weather Visualizer, the Climate Visualizer (Gordin & Pea 1995; Gordin, Polman

& Pea 1994) provides students with access to weather data. However, the Climate Visualizer

draws from a data set that contains twenty-five years of twice-daily temperature, wind, and

atmospheric pressure values from the early 1960’s to the late 1980’s for most of the northern

hemisphere. The Climate Visualizer allows students to display temperature as color, wind as

vectors, and barometric pressure gradients as contours. Through operations on data, the Climate

Visualizer enables students to track trends over diurnal, seasonal, and annual time periods.

Students have used the Climate Visualizer to conduct investigations into topics of their own

choosing that include the effect of coastlines on local temperatures, the impact of volcanoes on

weather, and projections of future climate.

The Greenhouse Effect Visualizer allows students to visualise and manipulate data having

to do with the balance of incoming and outgoing solar radiation in the earth’s atmosphere (Gordin,

Edelson & Pea 1995). The Greenhouse Effect Visualizer combines measured data with derived

data and provides students with access to variables such as incoming solar radiation (insolation),

reflectance of the earth’s surface (albedo), and surface temperatures of the earth. Students have

used the Greenhouse Effect Visualizer to investigate the possibility of global warming.

The second set of tools that the CoVis project has developed for high school students

support communication and collaboration, both within and beyond the classroom. The goal of

these tools is to foster the same sort of dialogue about scientific topics that the scientific community

engages in. Recognising that a classroom is often not a large enough community to allow a student

with a particular interest to find others who share that interest, the CoVis project is using

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networking technologies to create a larger community for students and teachers. This larger

community includes--in addition to students and teachers--scientists in relevant content areas,

museum staff at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, and educational researchers. In addition to

these committed participants, students have access to the resources and members of the Internet

community at large.

To create and support this community, the CoVis project has appropriated and adapted

tools developed for use in scientific and corporate workplaces. These technologies enable students

and others to work together within classrooms and across the country, at the same time

(synchronously) or at different times (asynchronously). To engage in synchronous collaboration,

several individuals can sit together at the same computer, or work together at a distance as if they

were sitting at the same computer. This is achieved through desktop video teleconferencing

coupled with remote screensharing.

Asynchronous collaboration in CoVis classrooms is supported both by conventional

communication applications such as e-mail and newsgroup discussions, and by a collaboration

environment developed by the CoVis project called the Collaboratory Notebook (Edelson, Pea, &

Gomez 1996; O’Neill & Gomez 1994). Students use e-mail and newsgroups to contact remote

experts and to post queries to both the CoVis community and the Internet community at large.

They use the Collaboratory Notebook as a collaboration environment for extended research

projects.

The Collaboratory Notebook is a networked, multimedia database that provides learners

with a mechanism for working cooperatively with others and is structured to support the inquiry

process. Some of its features resemble those of other collaboration and shared database

environments, such as CSILE (Scardamalia, Bereiter, Brett, et al. 1992) and INQUIRE (Hawkins

& Pea 1987). It is also designed to provide teachers and other mentors with a window into the

thinking processes and activities of students. In a prototypical use of the Collaboratory Notebook,

a group of students would develop an idea for an investigation and begin by recording some

questions and hypotheses using the Collaboratory Notebook. These may be followed by a plan for

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how to pursue these issues. A teacher could read the students’ questions, hypotheses and plans

and add comments to help them focus their efforts or to alert them to resources that they might find

useful. In the next stage, individual students might engage in separate research activities that they

could individually record for the others to view. In doing so, they might store both data and

analyses within the Notebook. Without needing to meet in person, students could exchange

questions and comments on their findings. Once they have conducted their investigations, they

could get further guidance from an instructor or a scientist mentor, and then use the information

they have recorded to draw conclusions or initiate further investigations.

Loosely modeled on the metaphor of a scientists’ notebook, the Collaboratory Notebook

provides users with the ability to author pages individually or in groups and to read the pages

authored by others. Pages are labeled according to the role they play in the inquiry process (e.g.,

question, plan, conjecture, evidence-for, evidence-against, commentary) and can be linked via a

hypermedia interface to other pages. The Collaboratory Notebook database is divided into

individual workspaces, called notebooks, that students and teachers may create to serve specific

purposes. In addition to text, students are able to store images, graphs, sound, animation or any

other computer-generated media in their notebooks. Taking advantage of the capability to use the

software from anywhere on the Internet, one teacher at a Chicago-area school conducted an activity

using the Collaboratory Notebook in which students in his class entered information about topics

in mineralogy, and scientist mentors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the

Exploratorium museum in San Francisco interceded with questions designed to impel students to

probe more deeply.

3.4 Authenticity

The CoVis project has adapted investigation tools used by scientists in order to provide

students with the opportunity to engage in authentic scientific practice. The adaptation

methodology used for the tools is designed to ensure that the tools are suitable for the knowledge

and abilities of high school students. The project supplements these tools with communication and

collaboration tools that enable students to engage in dialogue with a community of science practice

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that extends far beyond the boundaries of their classroom. In its work with teachers to develop

project-enhanced science classrooms, the CoVis project encourages them to make uncertainty,

commitment, and social interaction over science a central part of students’ activities.

4.0 A BROADER PERSPECTIVE ON SUPPORTING AUTHENTICITY WITH

TECHNOLOGY

The CoVis project is one of many that are engaged in the use of technology to facilitate

authentic scientific practices in classrooms. In this section, I use the framework of curriculum

structures, teacher support, and adaptation of scientific tools and techniques to describe some

underlying themes in this research and to highlight some distinguishing characteristics of a number

of these projects.

4.1 Curriculum Structures

Researchers that aim to foster authentic science practice in classrooms tend to describe their

approach to science learning as project-based (Blumenfeld, et al. 1991), project-enhanced (Ruopp,

et al. 1993), or problem-based (Barrows & Tamblyn 1980) learning. Their curriculum structures

typically take the form of activities that are oriented around one or a cluster of open-ended

questions. In the case of the projects described in this section, they all take advantage of

technology to support these activities. Two important themes in the curriculum activities of current

projects are: 1) a focus on local phenomena and 2) activities conducted in multi-school

communities.

Three projects that focus on the study of local phenomena are Global Laboratory, Kids as

Global Scientists, and ScienceWare (Spitulnik, Stratford, Jackson, et al. this volume). In the

Global Lab project, schools around the world each conduct an environmental study of a local site

on or near their school’s grounds. In the Kids as Global Scientists project, students study the local

weather patterns in their area and the particular geographic features that lead to these patterns. In

the ScienceWare project, students at a school in Michigan study the ecology of a stream that passes

close to the school. The benefit of studying these local phenomena is the motivation that comes

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from understanding one’s personal environment better and the recognition that science is relevant

to one’s personal lives. These benefits pay off through the sense of commitment, a hallmark of

authentic science, that students feel when studying their local environment.

Like CoVis, two of these projects—Global Lab and Kids as Global Scientists—also take

advantage of networking technologies to provide a multi-school community in which to conduct

the activities. These multi-school communities replicate in a fashion the collection of diverse

perspectives and experiences that make up the scientific community. While CoVis spans a broad

diversity of settings within the United States, the Global Lab and Kids as Global Scientists

community span the globe. In all three projects, students have the opportunity to share their

personal experience and local perspectives in the pursuit of questions of a scientific nature.

4.2 Teacher Support and Development

For many science teachers, providing students with the opportunity to pursue open-ended

inquiry is not a part of their current practice. This shift in approach requires a significant amount

of support. Several research projects are providing this support through the development of

specialised resource materials and the use of networking technologies to conduct on-line

professional development activities.

Projects involving large numbers of schools, such as CoVis, Global Lab, and Kids as

Global Scientists, have found it valuable to develop resource materials for distribution to

participating teachers. In the case of all three of these projects, the resource materials include

careful descriptions of both small-scale, well-structured activities resembling traditional labs and

larger-scale extended activities with a great deal of room for teacher and student specification of the

structure. In addition, both the Global Lab and CoVis resource guides include writings on

approaches to inquiry-based science pedagogy. In the case of the CoVis project, these materials

are available to teachers on-line via the CoVis Geosciences Server.

These projects have also taken advantage of communications technologies to conduct

moderated discussions of pedagogy and practice over networks. These professional development

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activities allow teachers to form their own communities of inquiry and practice. These

communities provide them both with moral support and an opportunity to share experience and

expertise. In a profession where isolation is a very common complaint, especially among science

teachers, these electronic communities can be an important key to enabling teachers to transform

their practice to support authentic activities.

4.3 Adaptation of Scientific Tools, Techniques, and Resources

The most fertile use of technology in adapting scientific practice for the purposes of science

learning has been in the adaptation of scientific tools, techniques, and resources. Four strands are

evident in current research that all facilitate the adoption of the attitudes, techniques, and social

interactions that characterise the scientific community by the science education community. These

strands are: 1) collection and sharing of data, 2) analysis of data through modeling and

visualization, 3) evidence gathering and evaluation, and 4) communication and collaboration.

Collection and Sharing of Data

The collection of data is an essential element of scientific practice. In a large number of

current educational research projects, students use scientific measurement devices that have been

adapted from scientists’ devices to be both suitable and affordable for educational environments.

In an analogy to the way the CoVis project has adapted scientists’ visualisation tools for learners,

projects such as Global Lab, ScienceWare, the Princeton Earth Physics Project (Nolet 1994), and

the MicroObservatory Project (Gingerich 1994) have developed student-appropriate tools and

techniques for the collection and sharing of data. As described above, in both the Global Lab

project and ScienceWare, students collect data in their local environment for analysis. The Global

Lab project has devoted their resources to developing inexpensive devices that provide reliable and

accurate measurements for quantities such as atmospheric ozone and ultraviolet radiation, but are

inexpensive and robust enough for classroom use. Many of these devices are constructed by the

teachers and students using materials that are common worldwide. The collection of data by

Global Lab schools is coordinated to maximise comparability across sites and then entered in a

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shared, centralised database that all the schools have access to. Similarly, the ScienceWare project

has developed interfaces to handheld Newton computers for inexpensive probes that are useful in

tracking stream ecology. In the geological sciences, the Princeton Earth Physics Project (PEPP)

has been developing low-cost accurate seismographs to enable schools to monitor seismic activity.

This project links schools together using electronic networking in order to share data. In this case,

differential measurements from sites at different locations provide important information about the

nature of the seismic activity observed. The MicroObservatory Project at the Harvard College

Observatory is engaged in a similar effort to develop and distribute a low-cost, automated-imaging

telescope for use in schools, similar to those used by astronomers (Gingerich 1994). These

computer-controlled telescopes will be used by students who will then share their data with others

via the Internet. It is no coincidence that all of these projects are in the environmental and earth

sciences. The professional communities in these fields have been at the forefront of the use of

advanced technologies for the global collection and sharing of scientific data.

Evidence Gathering and Evaluation

In a similar vein, two projects have focused on the identification of evidence by students to

support scientific reasoning and argumentation. The Knowledge Integration and Environment

(KIE) Project (Bell, Davis & Linn 1995, in press) at Berkeley has developed a learning

environment that provides students with the opportunity to search a database for relevant evidence

and construct a scientific argument using that evidence. Using a network browser based on one

that scientists use to conduct similar searches on the world-wide web, students work in a

educationally supportive environment in order to accumulate evidence from a database designed by

researchers for its pedagogical value. In the Science-in-Action series being created by the

Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, students view video-recorded scenarios containing

problems that students need to identify and solve. An important element of their challenge is to

identify the evidence embedded in the video scenario and accompanying print materials that will

allow them to construct a well-supported argument (Sherwood, Petrosino, Lin, et al. this volume).

An important significance of both of these projects for providing an authentic experience of science

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is the attitude of uncertainty that accompanies the central questions that these learning environments

raise for students.

Analysis of Data Through Modeling and Visualization

A large number of recent projects have focused on the creation of tools to support modeling

and the visualisation of data. Educational researchers have not failed to notice the impact of

computational tools for modeling and visualisation on scientific practice and have been quick to

explore ways to adapt these tools for learners. The Blue Skies project (Samson, Steremberg,

Ferguson, et al. 1994) and Project Globe (NSF 1994) are two educational projects that, like

CoVis, are exploring the development of learner-appropriate visualisation tools for atmospheric

data sets. Hands On Universe (Friedman 1995) has developed analogous data manipulation and

display tools for astronomy. ScienceWare, through its Model-It environment (Spitulnik, et al. this

volume), is providing students with a tool for constructing models to fit the data that they gather

about stream ecology. In all of these projects, the goal of the development effort has been to

provide students with tools that enable them to learn about a subject matter through the

investigation meaningful questions in ways that resemble the methods of practicing scientists. The

challenge is creating tools that can scaffold students in inquiry despite the limitations of their

scientific background and understanding.

Communication and Collaboration

The importance of tools for collaboration and communication in science practice is evidenced

by the fact that the explosive growth of the Internet, Usenet, and the world-wide web were all

ignited by the needs of the scientific research community. These networking environments support

the social interaction that is at the heart of scientific advancement. Collaboration tools that are

adapted and structured for learners, such as the CoVis Collaboratory Notebook, Global Lab’s

Alice software (Hunter 1993), KIE’s speakeasy (Bell, Davis & Linn 1995, in press), and the

CSILE (Scardamalia, et al. 1992) software being used in conjunction with the Scientist-in-Action

series, all reflect efforts by researchers to facilitate a similar process of social interaction over open-

Edelson, p. 17

ended scientific questions by learners. In their own way, each one of these collaboration

environments attempts to support and gently guide learners as they engage in complex activities.

5.0 CONCLUSION

In this chapter, I have argued for an increased role of authentic science practice in science

learning. However, it would be a mistake to view this argument as one that only has room for

extremes. That is, a class must be either traditional and didactic or entirely practice-oriented.

Effective science education will always consist of an appropriate balance between didactic

instruction and hands-on activity. Meaningful science practice at any level requires an

understanding of relevant fundamental science principles. It is a mistake to believe that the right

activities will allow students to discover those principles entirely on their own, just as it is wrong

to believe that they will understand them as a result of memorising them. Students should have the

opportunity to acquire and apply knowledge through scientific inquiry, as well as to expand and

structure their knowledge through lectures and readings. In the end, the responsibility for striking

the balance lies with the individual teacher who is able to make judgements about what is suitable

for his or her environment and students.

The ability of teachers to exercise this judgment, however, can be greatly enhanced by the

increased focus of researchers and scientists on the adaptation of science practice for educational

settings. The examples in this chapter demonstrate valuable roles for technology in this adaptation.

In particular, they show how the computational resources, tools, and techniques used by scientists

in their practice can be adapted for use in the classroom. In addition, they exploit networking

technologies to allow both students and teachers to become a part of a larger community of science

practitioners. However, the research described here reflects a second lesson that researchers have

learned: focusing on the issues of technology and adaptation of scientific tools alone is insufficient

to achieve authentic, suitable science learning. Achieving this goal requires strategies, both

technological and non-technological, for establishing appropriate curriculum structures and

preparing teachers.

Edelson, p. 18

In the complexity of the real world, reaching these objectives is extremely difficult. The

research projects described here are addressing the constraints of working in real classrooms with

teachers and students and are experiencing challenges that belie the rosy tone of this chapter.

Nevertheless, the broad involvement in these efforts indicates an enthusiasm for incorporating

authentic practices into science education that goes beyond researchers to include the teachers and

students themselves.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This material is based in part on work supported by the National Science Foundation under

grant number MDR-9253462. The author would like to acknowledge the critical role of the

members of the CoVis research team, Roy Pea, Louis Gomez, Barry Fishman, Eileen Lento,

Laura D’Amico, Doug Gordin, Steven McGee, Kevin O’Neill, and Joe Polman, in defining and

refining the ideas in this chapter.

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