The following descriptions explain how each of our projects has designed tools that enact these principles in various ways. Taken together, they make the point that there is no single "best" way to support epistemic practices. Each of the sections below includes a link to the project's home site.
Belvedere
We have jointly analyzed our individual efforts to design representational tools to support epistemic practices through scientific inquiry into specific disciplinary problems in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics. Through this effort, we have articulated the following set of design principles for representational tools that are outlined generally below.
Provide epistemic forms for students' expression of their thinking
Give distinct forms of knowledge distinct representations
Design representations that can be coordinated and linked
Representations should prompt and support epistemic (not just conceptual) practices
Communicate evaluation criteria and connect them to representations
Students should be able to use knowledge representation structures to express their thinking in ways that highlight epistemological aspects of scientific problem solving. Their inquiry can then be framed as an effort to construct a particular artifact of scientific knowledge. After Collins and Ferguson (1993) we consider the various knowledge representation tools that we have built to embody particular epistemic forms that enable specific epistemic games, or ways of constructing artifacts of student thinking.
Distinct forms of scientific knowledge, such as arguments or theories or data, should be represented in ways that distinguish them from each other. The classic example of this is that data is distinct from claims intended to explain them.
Students should be able to coordinate and link different, multiple representations in epistemically meaningful ways (e.g., linking representations of data as evidence to representations of causal relationships)
Epistemic forms should be designed such that as students interact with them to construct an artifact of their understanding they are prompted to engage in epistemic practices such as justifying claims, considering alternative explanations, judging the fit between data and causal claims, and so on.
This is a design principle for curricula more than specific knowledge representations. As a condition for students successful use of epistemic representations, the criteria by which their knowledge artifacts should be evaluated must be clearly communicated, and the representations themselves should support students' own evaluation of them.