Volume 17, Number 4 1998
Contents
Abstracts
Edited by: David A. Smith
Duke University Durham, NC, USAAssisted by: David J. DeVries
Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA, USACan one learn science from a commercial site? Well, I recently came across the SciCentral site (http://www.scicentral.com/), and I actually did learn a few things—about science, about learning science, about students of science, and about stimulating students to learn science. Here is how SciCentral describes itself:
“...[an] award-winning, fast-growing, 24-hour metadirectory intended to develop into an interdisciplinary information exchange center for the research community.
“... [our] selected resources...cover more than 120 specialties in science, engineering, and medicine, and constitute a gateway to over 50,000 specialized sites. Resources are indexed...only after thorough and selective review performed by our staff of professional scientists. These resources include comprehensive directories, specialized resources, databases, special reports, research news links, and other information of relevance to each specialty.
“... [We offer] additional features such as the K-12 Science section, the Travel Guide, [and] ‘Lend a Hand to a Colleague’.…”
The home page links to index pages for Biological Sciences, Health Sciences, Physical Sciences, Engineering, and Earth & Space Sciences, each of which is a gateway to pages addressing many individual research specialties. It also links to pages of resources on Women & Minorities inScience, U.S. Government Agencies, and Institutional Directories. There are another 10 links to Special Features, plus numerous links to news and other sources related to science.
This is a massive undertaking. Who pays for it? Advertisers. SciCentral makes a good case for access by advertisers to a large, targeted audience, and there are quite a few “sponsored” pages. However, in contrast to many other commercial sites, the advertising is not garish or intrusive.
Where does the learning come in? The eye is first drawn to a scrolling banner that highlights some feature of the site. This feature might be as lackluster as the site index or search engine, both of which appear right above the banner anyway. But on weekends the banner highlights After Hours Escapes, an intriguing link that I might have missed otherwise. On a recent weekend (it may change every week), the Escapes page took me to The Soundry (http://library.advanced.org/19537/), a really fascinating science site.
The Soundry (an obvious play on “foundry”) is an “all about sound” site. And I mean all: physiology of the ear, neuropsychology of auditory processing by the brain, physics of sound, analysis of waves, applications such as sonar, and history of sound-related technology. There is a “sound lab” with applets on beats, Doppler effect, harmonics, and more. And there is a message board on which the user can post (for the benefit of other users) personal reactions enhanced by one’s own discoveries in the sound lab.
All of this is structured in an intricately linked, but highly intuitive, interactive hypertext. There are also references for the information provided and links to other sound-related sites, including one with downloadable sound files for every occasion. The design of the site is aesthetically pleasing and includes a fixed navigation bar on the left whose boundary is not a straight line but a traveling wave (of course!).
The real kicker for me was when I clicked on the names of the authors—Alex Kulesza, David Green, and Granite Christopher—and discovered that they are, respectively, 16, 16, and 15 years old! The first two are students at Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology in Virginia and the third at Kenai Central High in Alaska—which says something about the potential for long-distance collaborations by students via the Web.
Now, how do three high school students come to produce such an outstanding learning resource? Well, the Soundry page links to ThinkQuest (http://www.thinkquest.org/), an annual international competition that challenges secondary students “to use the Internet as a collaborative, interactive, teaching and learning tool.” During the past three years, ThinkQuest has given $1 million in scholarships and awards to students, coaches, and institutions, ranging up to a $25,000 Best Entry prize. There are now more than 1,400 entries like The Soundry posted on the ThinkQuest site.
And who pays for ThinkQuest? In 1995, Advanced Network & Services, a nonprofit and one of the original developers of the Internet itself, sold its assets and operations to America Online. With the proceeds of that sale, AN&S initiated several programs in support of education and science, including ThinkQuest. Other sponsors and supporters include well-known names such as Adobe, Microsoft, Netscape, and Proxima.
I started with the question of whether one can learn science from a .com site and then wandered away to nonprofit (.org) sites for my learning experience. But that’s in the nature of using the Web. I didn’t know about ThinkQuest and wouldn’t have known where to look for a site like The Soundry, but it was easy to find SciCentral, the keepers of which decided to highlight a neat learning tool—which led me in turn to a massive collection of learning tools (not restricted to science) written for students by other students. SciCentral itself links to large numbers of articles about science, research results, and educational materials—all on other sites, such as journals, magazines, newspapers, university press offices, and databases. The added value comes from finding, selecting, and organizing the material, as well as keeping the listings up to date. Thus, there are many other directions one might go, starting from SciCentral, to learn about what’s new and/or important in a particular area or specialty in science—and also what’s available in Web-based learning materials.
Editorial Notes: “Learning: The Web” is a deliberate double entendre. On the one hand, it means the reader is learning about resources available on the World Wide Web. On the other hand, it means the column is about resources for learning. That is, we concentrate on Web sites that provide innovative environments in which students can be expected to learn. Your learning experience cannot end after reading this column. In fact, there is no way to convey in a static print medium any real sense of how learning from a Web site can take place. At best, the column will stimulate you to find and experience the subject Web site(s) yourself. (The technical term is “check it out.”) We (the editors) do not intend to write all the columns ourselves. Contributions that are consistent with the first paragraph are eagerly solicited, as are comments, suggestions, corrections, criticisms, or any other type of feedback. Send communications to das@math.duke.edu.DAS
Integrating Mathematics, Science, and Language Arts Instruction Using The World Wide Web
Kenneth Clark, Alice Hosticka, Judi Kent, and Ron Browne
College of Education Georgia Southern University Statesboro, GA 30460, USAclark@gsvms2.cc.gasou.edu
Keeping current in content and best practice methodologies in their fields is a difficult task for many educators. Becoming aware of all the resources available in a given content area can be an even larger challenge. Technology provides an efficient and powerful tool to assist in these tasks by allowing access to many teaching and learning resources through the World Wide Web (WWW). Use of the WWW opens doors for students and teachers to explore a vast "universe" of information.
Connecting the appropriate resources of the World Wide Web to classrooms can create many challenges for both students and teachers. These challenges come in two distinct areas: (a) those pertaining to computer literacy and access, and (b) those pertaining to how gathered information fits into the curriculum. This paper will address issues of access to WWW sites, mathematics and science content resources available on the WWW, and methods for integrating mathematics, science, and language arts instruction.
Michael L. Connell
Center for Mathematics, Science, and Technology Department of Curriculum and Instruction CUIN 5872 University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204-5872, USAmkahnl@aol.com
The research questions in this paper were addressed in two classrooms from the same school in a rural school district during a one-year period. Both classrooms were taught by master constructivist teachers who had participated in one year of inservice, support, co-teaching, and collaborative curriculum design prior to the work reported in this study. These two teachers agreed to implement technology within their classes in markedly different fashions to investigate potential roles technology might play in enhancing a constructivist approach. Although each of these classrooms would easily be classified as technology intensive, one mathematics classroom utilized the computer as a student tool for mathematics exploration—in line with the instructional philosophy of the class. The other classroom utilized the computer as a presentation tool—more in line with a behaviorist approach. In each of these two classrooms total time utilizing the machine remained relatively the same.
The efficacy of the constructivist mathematics instructional program itself is evidenced in that by the end of the research period both classrooms easily surpassed both state and district goals and had shown a significant improvement from their baseline. More importantly for this study, however, the classroom where technology usage was consciously aligned with the guiding constructivist philosophy showed a marked increase in students who both scored well and consistently, a significant improvement increase in performance scores, and a significant time by treatment effect relative to the classroom where technology usage was at odds with the philosophy of the classroom.
The conditions which seem to have led to these findings were first, that the technology utilization was “tightly linked” with the underlying instructional philosophy and approaches. Second, the technology in the constructivist orientation was used as a tool for student use in creating their own, personally meaningful, representations—not as a delivery system. Third, opportunities were presented for the students to create computer based tools for their use in solving the problems they encountered.
CHEE-KIT LOOI and BOON TEE TAN
Information Technology Institute, 11 Science Park Road Singapore Science Park II, Singapore 117685cheekit@iti.gov.sg
WORDMATH is a computer-based learning environment designed to teach word problem solving to 9-12-year-old students in Singapore primary schools. The students are taught to solve word problems using a locally developed approach called model building. Students draw blocks to represent “part-whole” relationships depicted in the problem statement, to visualize the problem more clearly, and to make tacit knowledge explicit. The design of WORDMATH is based on some of the teaching methods of the cognitive apprenticeship approach. In this article, we describe how these teaching methods have been implemented in the current version of the tutor. We also discuss results of a formative study of the tutor.
Rod Nason, Peter Lloyd, and Ian Ginns
Centre for Mathematics and Science Education Queensland University of Technology Locked Bag 2, Red Hill, Queensland 4059, AustraliaR.Nason@Qut.edu.au
Most current science education reform documents are placing much emphasis on having students become competent in identifying, accessing, and operating upon relevant information sources and in using the information to construct new knowledge. One of the means they suggest for achieving these aims is science project work. However, a review of the research literature indicates that little knowledge construction occurs during science projects. This article reports on a study in which a teacher used the collaborative development of a format-free computer database to facilitate the construction of knowledge by a group of three Year 6 students during a science project.
Fu-Yun Yu
Department of Curriculum and Instruction The University of Texas at Austin Austin, TX 78713, USAfuyun@mail.ncku.edu.tw
The study explored the relative effects of cooperation with and without inter-group competition on Taiwanese students’ academic achievement on science and attitudes toward science in a computer-assisted instruction (CAI) environment. Six fifth-grade classes (a total of 192 students) participated in three instructional sessions and were randomly assigned to two different treatment conditions (i.e., cooperation with inter-group competition and cooperation without inter-group competition). The obtained data showed significant differences between the two treatment conditions in student academic achievement, F (1, 190) = 3.75, p < .10, and student attitudes toward science, F (1, 190) = 8.13, p < .005. Based on the present and past research, cooperation without inter-group competition was suggested as the preferred instructional strategy to adopt rather than a cooperation with inter-group competition goal structuring method to enhance student cognitive and affective development.