Search

Students bring a multitude of ideas and experiences to the classroom while they are reasoning about scientific phenomena. They often need timely guidance to refine build upon their initial ideas. In this study we explore the development of guidance prompts to provide students with personalized, real-time feedback in the context of a pedagogically grounded chatbot. In the current version of the tool, guidance prompts are authored by learning scientists who are experts in the content of the items and in Knowledge Integration pedagogy. When students engage with the chatbot, an idea detection model is used to determine the ideas that are present in a student explanation and then the expert-authored guidance prompts are assigned based on rules about which ideas are or are not present in the student explanation. While this approach allows for close attention to and control of the pedagogical intent of each prompt, it is time consuming and not easily generalizable. Further this rule-based approach limits the ways in which students can interact with the chatbot. The work in progress study presented in this paper explores the potential of using generative AI to create similarly pedagogically grounded guidance prompts as a first step towards increasing the generalizability and scalability of this approach. Specifically, we ask: using criteria from the Knowledge Integration Pedagogical Framework, how do ChatGPT 3.5-authored guidance prompts compare to human expert-authored guidance prompts? We find that while prompt engineering can enhance the alignment of ChatGPT-authored guidance prompts with pedagogical criteria, the human expert-authored guidance prompts more consistently meet the pedagogical criteria.

To promote a justice-oriented approach to science education, we formed a research-practice partnership between middle school science teachers, their students, curriculum designers, learning scientists, and experts in social justice to co-design and test an environmental justice unit for middle school instruction. We examine teacher perspectives on the challenges and possibilities of integrating social justice into their standards-aligned science teaching as they participate in co-design and teach the unit. The unit supports students to investigate racially disparate rates of asthma in their community by examining pollution maps and historical redlining maps. We analyze interviews and co-design artifacts from two teachers who participated in the co-design and taught the unit in their classrooms. Our findings point to the benefits of a shared pedagogical framework and an initial unit featuring local historical content to structure co-design. Findings also reveal that teachers can share similar goals for empowering students to use science knowledge for civic action while framing the local socio-political factors contributing to the injustice differently, due in part to different institutional supports and constraints. Student interviews and a pre/postassessment illustrate how the unit facilitated students' progress in connecting socio-political and science ideas to explain the impacts of particulate matter pollution and who is impacted most. Analyses illuminate how teachers' pedagogical choices may influence whether and how students discuss the impact of systemic racism in their explanations. The findings inform refinement of the unit and suggest supports needed for co-design partnerships focused on integrating social justice and science.

Many studies investigating inquiry learning in science domains have appeared over the years. Throughout this period, inquiry learning has been regularly criticized by scholars who favor direct instruction over inquiry learning. In this vein, Zhang, Kirschner, Cobern, and Sweller (2022) recently asserted that direct instruction is overall superior to inquiry-based instruction and reproached policy makers for ignoring this fact. In the current article we reply to this assertion and the premises on which it is based. We review the evidence and argue that a more complete and correct interpretation of the literature demonstrates that inquiry-based instruction produces better overall results for acquiring conceptual knowledge than does direct instruction. We show that this conclusion holds for controlled, correlational, and program-based studies. We subsequently argue that inquiry-based and direct instruction each have their specific virtues and disadvantages and that the effectiveness of each approach depends on moderating factors such as the learning goal, the domain involved, and students' prior knowledge and other student characteristics. Furthermore, inquiry-based instruction is most effective when supplemented with guidance that can be personalized based on these moderating factors and can even involve providing direct instruction. Therefore, we posit that a combination of inquiry and direct instruction may often be the best approach to support student learning. We conclude that policy makers rightfully advocate inquiry-based instruction, particularly when students’ investigations are supplemented with direct instruction at appropriate junctures.

Peer ideas can be valuable contributions to scientific inquiry. Divergent peer ideas can enrich students' thinking and encourage curiosity. Meanwhile, similar peer ideas can promote convergent thinking that can reinforce understanding. However, students need guidance in critically evaluating peer ideas in relation to their own, and in recognizing the influence of peers’ ideas. Guided by the Knowledge Integration framework, we explore whether students’ perceptions of the impact of peers’ ideas align with the revisions made to their written explanations. In a technology-rich, classroom-based inquiry unit on cancer cell division, Grade 7 students (N = 144) investigated the effects of different cancer treatments on cell division, and developed explanations for a recommended treatment. We prompted one group of students to visit a class repository to seek peer ideas similar to their own, and another to seek ideas different from their own. Both groups then revised their recommendations. Based on analyses of students' reflections, initial and revised explanations, and pre and posttests, we found that students prompted to seek divergent ideas perceived peers’ ideas to be more impactful, even though both groups of students revised at the same rate and made similar pre to posttest gains. This study suggests a need to attend to students’ perceptions of the roles of their peers, particularly in environments designed to reflect authentic processes of the social construction of scientific knowledge.

Guiding teachers to customize curriculum has shown to improve science instruction when guided effectively. We explore how teachers use student data to customize a web-based science unit on plate tectonics. We study the implications for teacher learning along with the impact on student self-directed learning. During a professional development workshop, four 7th grade teachers reviewed logs of their students’ explanations and revisions. They used a curriculum visualization tool that revealed the pedagogy behind the unit to plan their customizations. To promote self-directed learning, the teachers decided to customize the guidance for explanation revision by giving students a choice among guidance options. They took advantage of the web-based unit to randomly assign students (N = 479) to either a guidance Choice or a no-choice condition. We analyzed logged student explanation revisions on embedded and pre-test/post-test assessments and teacher and student written reflections and interviews. Students in the guidance Choice condition reported that the guidance was more useful than those in the no-choice condition and made more progress on their revisions. Teachers valued the opportunity to review student work, use the visualization tool to align their customization with the knowledge integration pedagogy, and investigate the choice option empirically. These findings suggest that the teachers’ decision to offer choice among guidance options promoted aspects of self-directed learning.

Understanding the impact of undergraduate research experiences (UREs) and course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) is crucial as universities debate the value of allocating scarce resources to these activities. We report on the Berkeley Undergraduate Research Evaluation Tools (BURET), designed to assess the learning outcomes of UREs and CUREs in chemistry and other sciences. To validate the tools, we administered BURET to 70 undergraduate students in the College of Chemistry and 19 students from other STEM fields, comparing the performance of students who had less than one year of undergraduate research to those with more than one year of research experience. Students wrote reflections and responded to interviews during poster presentations of their research project. BURET asks students to communicate the significance of their project, analyze their experimental design, interpret their data, and propose future research. Scoring rubrics reward students for integrating disciplinary evidence into their narratives. We found that the instruments yielded reliable scores, and the results clarified the impacts of undergraduate research, specifically characterizing the strengths and weaknesses of undergraduate researchers in chemistry at our institution. Students with at least a year of research experience were able to use disciplinary evidence more effectively than those with less than one year of experience. First-year students excelled at explaining the societal relevance of their work, but they incorporated only minimal discussion of prior research into their reflections and presentations. Students at all levels struggled to critique their own experimental design. These results have important implications for undergraduate learning, suggesting areas for faculty members, graduate student research mentors, and CURE or URE programs to improve undergraduate research experiences.

Prompted by the sudden shift to remote instruction in March 2020 brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers explored online resources to support their students learning from home. We report on how twelve teachers identified and creatively leveraged open educational resources (OERs) and practices to facilitate self-directed science learning. Based on interviews and logged data, we illustrate how teachers' use of OER starkly differed from the typical uses of technology for transmitting information or increasing productivity. These experiences provide insights into ways teachers and professional developers can take advantage of OER to promote self-directed learning when in-person instruction resumes.

This study reports on the design, implementation, and impact of a remote professional development (PD) course for secondary school teachers who were transitioning to remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. We designed technology innovations to strengthen the previously successful in-person course. The innovations support teachers to customize an instructional unit by setting and revising goals based on evidence from their students' prior work on the unit. A Curriculum Visualizer makes the pedagogy of the unit visible and guides planning for customization. Carefully curated small group activities using Zoom breakout rooms ensure that each teacher could share their thoughts, ideas, and impressions with other teachers. Participants were 23 science teachers from 12 different schools in a western U.S. state. We developed rubrics to code customization goals, plans, and moves using bottom-up methods and iterative refinement. Reflections on student work and use of the Curriculum Visualizer enabled teachers to set and refine customization goals and make evidence-based and pedagogy-aligned customization decisions that enhanced the interactive learning opportunities for their students. Our results reinforce the C-b model proposed by Sailer et al. (this issue) by illustrating the value of using technology to support collaborative, interactive PD activities.

Graph technologies are now widely available in K-12 science and mathematics classrooms. These technologies have the potential to impact the learning of science and mathematics, especially by supporting student investigations. We use meta-analysis to analyze 42 design and comparison studies involving data from 7699 students spanning over 35 years. In these studies, graphing technologies include computer software such as simulations; online tools such as graph utilities; and sensors such as temperature probes. We characterize the assessments used to measure graphing. We describe the investigative activities that graphing supports including generating hypotheses or predictions, collecting data, analyzing or interpreting data, and reflecting. Studies show that graphing technologies impact learning of mathematics and science topics as well as graphing itself. These technologies are especially advantageous for learning complex topics where students need to conduct investigations to interpret change over time or position such as functions, kinematics, and thermodynamics. Recent studies take advantage of logs of student interactions to study the design of automated guidance for graphing. We discuss the implications of these findings for instruction at the K-12 level.

We describe the emergence of the interdisciplinary learning sciences field and its consequential transformations, drawing on experiences that brought us together. Starting with our undergraduate years, the account culminates with the formation of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). We identify six themes shaping the emergence of the learning sciences and our own trajectories: (a) broadening the community and incorporating new disciplinary perspectives; (b) appropriating and developing new methods; (c) reconceptualizing challenges; (d) creating artifacts; (e) developing abstractions; and (f) developing people. We intend this personal account to stimulate new initiatives and deepening insights as the journey of the learning sciences continues.

Advances in technology have increased the opportunities for designers to personalise instruction based on student actions. We conducted semi-structured interviews with an international sample of educational professionals including researchers, teachers and designers, and reviewed interdisciplinary literature on personalisation to propose a framework for personalisation research and design. Thematic analysis of the interviews revealed that professionals value each type of personalisation opportunity (eg, customising for age-appropriate content, supports for student choice, automated guidance based on learner responses) and identify challenges (eg, trade-offs between adaptive and standardised instruction). Three research/design dilemmas emerged: individualisation and equity; group customisation and individual benefit; and adaptation and validity of measurement. We discuss these dilemmas in relation to three categories of personalisation: "customisation" by designers or teachers to support a specific audience (grade level, course, community); "individualisation" to support user choice (of book to read, project topic); and "adaptation" of instructional activities based on automated analysis of logged user performance (performance metrics, natural language processing, cumulative indicators). We suggest some guiding questions for a generative agenda for future research on personalised instruction.

Inquiry instruction often neglects graphing. It gives students few opportunities to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to take advantage of graphs, and which are called for by current science education standards. Yet, it is not well known how to support graphing skills, particularly within middle school science inquiry contexts. Using qualitative graphs is a promising, but underexplored approach. In contrast to quantitative graphs, which can lead students to focus too narrowly on the mechanics of plotting points, qualitative graphs can encourage students to relate graphical representations to their conceptual meaning. Guided by the Knowledge Integration framework, which recognizes and guides students in integrating their diverse ideas about science, we incorporated qualitative graphing activities into a seventh grade web-based inquiry unit about cell division and cancer treatment. In Study 1, we characterized the kinds of graphs students generated in terms of their integration of graphical and scientific knowledge. We also found that students (n = 30) using the unit made significant learning gains based on their pretest to post-test scores. In Study 2, we compared students' performance in two versions of the same unit: One that had students construct, and second that had them critique qualitative graphs. Results showed that both activities had distinct benefits, and improved students' (n = 117) integrated understanding of graphs and science. Specifically, critiquing graphs helped students improve their scientific explanations within the unit, while constructing graphs led students to link key science ideas within both their in-unit and post-unit explanations. We discuss the relative affordances and constraints of critique and construction activities, and observe students' common misunderstandings of graphs. In all, this study offers a critical exploration of how to design instruction that simultaneously supports students' science and graph understanding within complex inquiry contexts.

This paper illustrates how the combination of teacher and computer guidance can strengthen collaborative revision and identifies opportunities for teacher guidance in a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. We took advantage of natural language processing tools embedded in an online, collaborative environment to automatically score student responses using human-designed knowledge integration rubrics. We used the automated explanation scores to assign adaptive guidance to the students and to provide real-time information to the teacher on students’ learning. We study how one teacher customizes the automated guidance tools and incorporates it with her in-class monitoring system to guide 98 student pairs in meaningful revision of two science explanations embedded in an online plate tectonics unit. Our study draws on video and audio recordings of teacher-student interactions during instruction as well as on student responses to pretest, embedded and posttest assessments. The findings reveal five distinct strategies the teacher used to guide student pairs in collaborative revision. The teacher’s strategies draw on the automated guidance to personalize guidance of student ideas. The teacher’s guidance system supported all pairs to engage in two rounds of revision for the two explanations in the unit. Students made more substantial revisions on posttest than on pretest yet the percentage of students who engaged in revision overall remained small. Results can inform the design of teacher professional development for guiding student pairs in collaborative revision in a computer-supported environment.

Integrating sophisticated graphical analysis skills as they learn science is essential for K-12 students and emphasized in current standards. In this study, we iteratively designed a Graphing Integration Inventory (GII) over a three-year period, while also supporting students to develop their capabilities to use graphs to learn science content in complex ways through interactive curriculum materials implemented on a novel technology enhanced curriculum platform. We applied the Knowledge Integration framework to design the curriculum, the assessments, and the rubrics for scoring student explanations. The framework delineates ways to promote links among graphs and science ideas. The rubrics award students higher scores on their explanations based on the level of complexity of their connections between science concepts and, in this research, graphs. The GII and the aligned curriculum were implemented by over 300 middle school students (Grades 6-8) across a 3-year period. We investigated the impact of the designed curriculum on the integration of graphing and science while also studying the psychometric properties of the GII to validate it for use in future studies. Findings suggest both that the curriculum used to support these students improved their Knowledge Integration capabilities significantly and that the GII instrument is suitable for use with populations across gender and native English language status demographics in Grades 6-8. Implications are discussed around using graphs to learn complex science ideas, as well as the affordances of technology enhanced platforms to support this type of learning and assessment.

Advances in technology, science, and learning sciences research over the past 100 years have reshaped science education. This chapter focuses on how investigators from varied fields of inquiry who initially worked separately began to interact, eventually formed partnerships, and recently integrated their perspectives to strengthen science education. Advances depended on the broadening of the participants in science education research, starting with psychologists, science discipline experts, and science educators; adding science teachers, psychometricians, computer scientists, and sociologists; and eventually including leaders in cultural studies, linguistics, and neuroscience. This process depended on renegotiating power structures, deliberate funding decisions by the National Science Foundation and others, and sustained, creative teamwork. It reflects a growing commitment to ensure that all learners are respected and that all students learn to address the complex scientific dilemmas they face in their lives. This chapter traces the evolution of research on science education in the United States with a focus on 5- to 17-year-olds. It highlights trends in the view of the learner, the design of instruction, the role of professional development, and the impact of technology. The chapter closes with recommendations designed to realize the full potential of these advances.

Science inquiry challenges students to synthesize various ideas about complex phenomena into coherent explanations. It also challenges teachers, who must guide their diverse students' developing understanding during student-paced investigations. We describe the Idea Manager, a suite of web-based, curriculum-integrated tools that (a) guides students' knowledge integration as they generate, distinguish, and reconcile their ideas; and (b) provides means for teachers to monitor learning over the course of technology-enhanced science inquiry units. With the Idea Manager tool, students document short, text-based ideas, tag and sort them along various attributes, and exchange them with classmates. At culminating points of their investigations, students graphically organize their ideas to prepare written scientific explanations. Meanwhile, logs of idea entries, revisions, and meta-data inform teachers' and researchers' decisions about instruction and design. This paper offers an account of the design moves made in refining the Idea Manager, and highlights the importance of teacher-researcher partnerships and classroom implementations. Through designers' artifacts, classroom research findings, and teachers' and researchers' reflections, we illustrate the tool's origins; our strategies for testing new features and eliciting stakeholders' feedback, and how middle and high school classroom implementations inform the tool's continued iterations. Based on learning theory and on our own 40+ collective years of classroom teaching experience, we explain our design decisions and describe how new features and patterns for the tool's use emerged from a community of researchers. Finally, we reflect on the process of iteration that advances both theory and design, and on the value of pedagogically-driven technology design.

Designing learning experiences that support the development of coherent understanding of complex scientific phenomena is challenging. We sought to identify analytics that can also guide such designs to support retention of coherent understanding. Based on prior research that distributing study of material over time supports retention, we explored revisiting previously studied material as an analytic. We tested ways to operationalize revisiting: as a general propensity to revisit previously studied material; as a propensity to revisit specific curricular steps; as a general propensity to distribute study by revisiting previously studied material on different days; and as a propensity to distribute study by revisiting specific steps on different days. The specific steps identified as central to the learning design included a static illustration and a dynamic visualization. We modelled revisiting in a sample of 664 students taught by seven different teachers using a Web-based Inquiry Science Environment unit. Analysis of log files and regression modelling revealed that a general propensity to revisit did not predict retention. Revisiting the dynamic visualization better supported retention than revisiting static material, but only for distributed revisiting. Our findings suggest that revisiting can be a useful analytic when aligned with the framework guiding learning design.

When middle school students learn science content withgraphs, the graphing and science knowledge may be mutuallyreinforcing: understanding the science content may help stu-dents interpret a related graph, and information from a graphmay illustrate a scientific concept. We examine this relation-ship between graphing and science by studying how studentslearn from interactive computer models with accompanyingdata graphs. The computer models provide an animated simu-lation that illustrates an unobservable phenomenon, while thedata graph tracks one or more quantities over time. This or-dering study, on middle school students learning about photo-synthesis, indicates that engaging with novel graph conceptshelped students interpret their data as they experimented withthe computer model. The study also provided some supportfor the opposite direction: experimenting with the model firsthelped students make sense of the graphs.

Graphs illustrating complex scientific relationships require students to integrate multiple concepts and visual features into a coherent understanding. We investigate ways to support students in integrating their understanding of density concepts through a graph that is linked to a simulation depicting the relationship between mass, volume, and density. We randomly assigned 325 8th-grade students to 1 of 2 graphing activities. In the "analyze" condition, students plotted a set of data points selected to help clarify the relationship between mass, volume, and buoyancy, and then interacted with a guided simulation to improve their plotting accuracy. In the "generate" condition, students chose their own data points, and then interacted with a guided simulation to test and revise their choices. We found that, although "analyze" participants were more likely to construct accurate graphs, "generate" participants were more likely to develop a coherent understanding of density and buoyancy. Analyses of process data and interviews suggest that "generate" participants grappled with the mass-volume ratio by deliberately testing points and identifying patterns as they updated their understanding of science concepts. In contrast, "analyze" participants displayed less deliberate exploration of the graph space. We discuss how activities that integrate graph interpretation and concept refinement can deepen science learning.

In this study, we explore how two different prompt types within an online computer-based inquiry learning environment enhance 392 7th grade students’ explanations of evolution with three teachers. In the elaborating prompt condition, students are prompted to write explanations that support the accepted theory of evolution. In the competing prompt condition, students are prompted to write explanations that differentiate two views of evolution associated with Darwin and Lamarck. Data sources included a pretest and posttest, an embedded item, observations, logged teacher guidance, and teacher interviews. Findings show similar pretest to posttest gains in students’ understanding of evolution for both conditions, but this pattern was not uniform across all three teachers. For one teacher, students who received competing theory prompts produced significantly higher gains than those who received elaborating theory prompts. A closer look at embedded student work reveals a higher degree of teacher participation (i.e., grading and guidance) than for the other teachers. Our findings illustrate how helping students distinguish between competing scientific claims can support learning in an inquiry unit, but may require a higher degree of teacher participation and reinforcement. We discuss the implications of these findings for enhancing students’ scientific explanations. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 53: 1341–1363, 2016.

Advances in technology, science, and learning sciences research over the past 100 years have reshaped science education. This chapter focuses on how investigators from varied fields of inquiry who initially worked separately began to interact, eventually formed partnerships, and recently integrated their perspectives to strengthen science education. Advances depended on the broadening of the participants in science education research, starting with psychologists, science discipline experts, and science educators; adding science teachers, psychometricians, computer scientists, and sociologists; and eventually including leaders in cultural studies, linguistics, and neuroscience. This process depended on renegotiating power structures, deliberate funding decisions by the National Science Foundation and others, and sustained, creative teamwork. It reflects a growing commitment to ensure that all learners are respected and that all students learn to address the complex scientific dilemmas they face in their lives. This chapter traces the evolution of research on science education in the United States with a focus on 5- to 17-year-olds. It highlights trends in the view of the learner, the design of instruction, the role of professional development, and the impact of technology. The chapter closes with recommendations designed to realize the full potential of these advances.

In 4 classroom experiments we investigated uses for technologies that automatically score student generated essays, concept diagrams, and drawings in inquiry curricula. We used the automatic scores to assign typical and research-based guidance and studied the impact of the guidance on student progress. Seven teachers and their 897 students participated. We documented the impact of guidance using pretests, embedded assessments, posttests, logged computer interaction data, and student and teacher interviews. We compared guidance designed to promote knowledge integration to 3 alternatives typically used in middle school classrooms. The knowledge integration guidance was more effective than generic guidance and specific guidance, and as effective as guidance designed by experienced teachers who also participated in professional development that emphasized knowledge integration. Results suggest that using automatic scores to assign knowledge integration guidance can provide an inquiry teaching partner: this guidance helps students use evidence to sort out ideas and can free teachers to support students who need extra help.

Openers, or brief activities that initiate a class, routinely take up classroom time each day yet little is known about how to design these activities so they contribute to student learning. This study uses technology-enhanced learning environments to explore new opportunities to transform Openers from potentially busy work to knowledge generating activities. This study compares the impact of teacher-designed Openers, Opener designs based on recent research emphasizing knowledge integration, and no Opener for an 8th grade technology-enhanced inquiry science investigation. Results suggest that students who participate in a researcher-designed Opener are more likely to revisit and refine their work, and to make significant learning gains, than students who do not participate in an Opener. Students make the greatest gains when they revisit key evidence in the technology-enhanced curriculum unit prior to revision. Engaging students in processes that promote knowledge integration during the Opener motivate students to revise their ideas. The results suggest design principles for Openers in technology-enhanced instruction.

High-stakes tests take time away from valuable learning activities, narrow the focus of instruction, and imply that science involves memorizing details rather than understanding the natural world. Current tests lead precollege instructors to postpone science inquiry activities until after the last standardized test is completed--often during the last week of school. Students spend countless hours practicing and taking multiple-choice tests that have little educational value. Learning tests that help students understand science and measure progress at the same time are needed. This article discusses the following topics regarding science education: (1) Learning Test Goals; (2) Teaching and Assessing Lifelong Learning; (3) Visualizations and Assessment; (4) Teaching and Assessing with Concept Maps; (5) Essay Questions, Learning, and Assessment; and (6) Improving Assessment in Lecture Classes. Valuable classroom time can be reclaimed by using online learning environments that incorporate learning tests to measure lifelong learning skills. Think about what would happen if scientists spent time memorizing new facts rather than investigating compelling problems. A focus on lifelong learning to the classroom needs to be restored to retain a competitive advantage in science.

Science is increasingly characterized by participation in knowledge communities. To meaningfully engage in science inquiry, students must be able to evaluate diverse sources of information, articulate informed ideas, and share ideas with peers. This study explores how technology can support idea exchanges in ways that value individuals' prior ideas, and allow students to use these ideas to benefit their own and their peers' learning. We used the Idea Manager, a curriculum-integrated tool that enables students to collect and exchange ideas during science inquiry projects. We investigated how students exchanged ideas, how these exchanges impacted the explanations they ultimately produced, and how the tool impacted teachers' instruction. We implemented the tool with 297 grade 7 students, who were studying a web-based unit on cancer and cell division. Among other results, we found a relationship between the diversity of students' ideas, and the sources of those ideas (i.e., whether they came from the students themselves or from their peers), and the quality of students' scientific explanations. Specifically, students who collected more unique ideas (i.e., ideas not already represented in their private idea collections) as opposed to redundant ideas (i.e., ideas that reiterated ideas already present in their private idea collections) tended to write poorer explanations; and students who generated their own redundant ideas, as opposed to choosing peers' ideas that were redundant, tended to write better explanations. We discuss implications for formative assessment, and for the role of technology in supporting students to engage more meaningfully with peers' ideas.

This study is inspired by laboratory studies demonstrating that distributing study sessions over time better supports learning and retention than clustering sessions. We compare two implementations of a multi-day inquiry science unit: in the clustered instruction condition, students completed an inquiry unit in five consecutive class periods. In the distributed instruction condition, students completed one activity per week for five weeks. Both conditions resulted in significant and similar gains in understanding and retention overall. Students' self-directed revisits to previously studied materials differed by condition, with students in the clustered condition tending to visit materials studied on previous days. These "distal" revisits explained variance in delayed post-test scores as an interaction effect with condition. Students in the clustered condition who revisited distal materials tended to score higher on the delayed post-test, whereas those in the distributed condition who did so tended to score lower. Our findings illustrate the complexity of realising laboratory findings in classrooms under real-world conditions.

Supporting students to revise their written explanations in science can help students to integrate disparate ideas and develop a coherent, generative account of complex scientific topics. Using natural language processing to analyze student written work, we compare forms of automated guidance designed to motivate productive revision and help students integrate their understanding of science. Research shows the benefit of providing timely, transparent guidance to students and identifies some challenges. Specifically, (a) students often believe online guidance is generic rather than adapted to their response; and (b) students do not always engage effortfully with online guidance to improve their written responses. We conducted two studies to address these challenges. In Study 1, we created "transparent" guidance that clarified how the computer personalizes guidance based on the student response. We hypothesized that transparent guidance would be especially valuable for low prior knowledge students who might expect the computer guidance to be too difficult. We found that transparent guidance had a greater impact than typical guidance on low prior knowledge student revisions, suggesting that student beliefs about how guidance is designed influence their performance. In Study 2, implemented in six schools, we compared two specific guidance strategies: "revisiting evidence" and "planning" writing changes. We found that both revisiting and planning guidance resulted in significant improvement in student knowledge integration, although neither guidance strategy showed a significant advantage over the other. In addition, we found that the form of guidance interacted with school, suggesting that teacher practices could reinforce a specific guidance strategy. These results illustrate ways to design guidance to strengthen student understanding of science. They raise important questions about when to encourage revisiting, how to design instruction focused on planning, and how to instill a lifelong practice of engaging in iterative refinement of scientific explanations.

Content-based automated scoring has been applied in a variety of science domains. However, many prior applications involved simplified scoring rubrics without considering rubrics representing multiple levels of understanding. This study tested a concept-based scoring tool for content-based scoring, c-rater™, for four science items with rubrics aiming to differentiate among multiple levels of understanding. The items showed moderate to good agreement with human scores. The findings suggest that automated scoring has the potential to score constructed-response items with complex scoring rubrics, but in its current design cannot replace human raters. This article discusses sources of disagreement and factors that could potentially improve the accuracy of concept-based automated scoring. © 2014 by the National Council on Measurement in Education.

Physical design projects are a way to motivate and engage students in authentic science and engineering practices. Web-based tools can support design projects to ensure that students address and reflect upon critical science concepts during the course of the project. In addition, by specifying challenging design goals that require students to consider potential trade-offs between features, web-based tools may promote more deliberative scientific inquiry than open-ended or feature maximization goals. To study the role of web-supported projects, we developed an online curriculum that guides students through the planning, building, and analysis of self-propelled vehicles. To address content related to energy transformation we incorporated virtual models that display dynamic graphs of energy levels as a virtual scooter travels along a path. We compared two design goals for the project with different constraints. In the "target" version students are prompted to build virtual and physical scooters to reach a specific position. In the "distance" version students are prompted to maximize the distance the scooter travels. Our results indicate that students learned energy concepts from both versions; however, students with the "target" version did refer to the virtual model in their posttest responses to a greater degree than those with the "distance" version.

Citizens in all fields need to understand how science and technology affect policy, business, and personal decisions. The shortage of trained scientists and engineers is a small indicator of a much larger problem: insufficient knowledge and understanding about science and technology across our population. The educational system must respond dynamically to prepare our population for the complex, evolving, global challenges of the 21st century. Advances in technology are poised to meet these educational demands. Cyberlearning offers new learning and educational approaches and the possibility of redistributing learning experiences over time and space, beyond the classroom and throughout a lifetime. We believe that cyberlearning has reached a turning point where learning payoffs can be accelerated. We also believe that this moment could be fleeting because, without deliberate efforts to coordinate cyberlearning approaches, we will miss the opportunity to provide effective support for the convergence of learning and technology. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is in a position to stimulate research and development that can enable this process. Cyberlearning has tremendous potential right now because we have powerful new technologies, increased understanding of learning and instruction, and widespread demand for solutions to educational problems. In the last decade, the design of technologies and our understanding of how people learn have evolved together, while new approaches to research and design make the development and testing of technologies more responsive to real-world requirements and learning environments. NSF has played a key role in these advances, funding interdisciplinary programs specifically to support research and activities in the area of cyberlearning. NSF can continue to lead this revolution by leveraging its investments in the productive intersections between technology and the learning sciences. https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf08204