Off and on for decades inquiry has been promoted as a means for engaging science students in scientific activity that promotes deep conceptual learning and develops students' scientific literacy. Most recently, national standards call for students to engage in inquiry as a means of learning what the scientific enterprise is all about . For the most part, although there has been a fair amount of research to document students' beliefs about the nature of science, relatively little attention has been paid to how we can support changes in students' scientific epistemologies.
In 1999 the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies (CILT) awarded us a seed grant to explore the relationships between our various individual efforts to understand the issues of developing software tools that supported students' scientific inquiry and highlighted important epistemic aspects of that inquiry. This site is a summary of our progress to articulate a set of epistemic practices that we value in science learning, and a set of design principles for supporting such practices, as they have emerged in our individual works.
We hope that this site will be a resource to the broader communities of science educators and educational technologists. These pages articulate our view of important epistemic goals for science learning, discursive and reasoning practices that can support such goals, and design principles for representational tools that support the practices. We have also included summary descriptions of our individual tools as examples of how the design principles can be implemented in various contexts and in different ways.
For those who prefer paper pages over electronic ones, our argument is summarized in a position paper delivered at the 2000 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Assn. (PDF).