That dissonance she felt between authentic science inquiry and the school subject of science has led her to develop a host of on-line projects that support science learners and their teachers in pursuing scientific inquiry, even as she pursues her own research questions:
BioKids, the umbrella project, which encompasses:
- Kids as Global Scientists, an Internet-enhanced curriculum that encourages middle school students’ inquiry and research about basic concepts of weather and climate;
- Hurricanes, a suite of classroom activities on CD-ROM and Internet that allows middle school students to collaborate in studying hurricanes;
- BIO-Kids: Kids’ Inquiry of Diverse Species, which offers students opportunities to explore biodiversity locally and worldwide using technologies such as interactive CD-ROMs and electronic discussion boards,
Dr.
Songer
explains, “As I was writing one of my first grants, Internet
use was exploding, but there was little discussion of its potential for supporting
learning. As we began One Sky, Many Voices, we speculated, “Let’s
imagine what the Internet could do for learning in the most ideal sense.” She
continues,
"In the earliest days, the Internet offered data sets and communication tools that even professional scientists found difficult to use. Nevertheless, I rather foolishly believed that the Internet held the potential to be a powerful educational tool. Early on, the scientists on the One Sky team and I also knew that if our learning environment grew as we hoped, we couldn’t answer every single question children might have about weather and atmosphere…Our goal became the creation of an Internet-based learning environment that combined the need to have each individual child’s questions addressed with the understanding that children, not us, could become the experts about their own local weather. Children in Michigan could develop first-hand expertise about the weather in Michigan; children in Guam could become experts on the weather in Guam. Building on one of the strengths of the Internet, global connectivity, we designed one of the first learning environments where the scientific knowledge base existed among and between the ten thousand children and scientists distributed throughout our hundreds of Internet-connected classrooms.”
While it is tricky to make user-friendly Internet-based interfaces that support and engage young learners and their teachers, complications multiply when the aim is to immerse students in real scientific data:
“One of the key aspects of projects like One Sky, Many Voices and BioKIDS, which have students engaging in the processes of scientists, is that we must construct ways for complex, authentic data to be “made simple” in important ways. These transformations of data are necessary to emphasize salient features, so that kids can focus on essential dimensions of these data. Otherwise, students can be swamped by complexity.”
Kim, a student participant in Hurricanes, offers testimony to the success of Songer’s efforts to make scientific inquiry accessible:
“It’s so fun and easy to learn about the hurricanes of today. I enjoyed looking at all the graphs, learning many different words, and pretty much just the whole program…(A)ll the facts that I learned stayed in my mind, better than going into one ear and out of the other.”
At the same time Dr. Songer and her team actually design, build and test web sites and tools in collaboration with educators and students, they also ask important questions about learning, teaching, curriculum, and assessment. A current research project focuses on the assessment of complex scientific reasoning:
"As science education researchers, we say that the development of inquiry understandings in science takes a long time, yet we investigate students’ learning over the course of a 4-8 week unit of study. This seems contradictory. We need learning research that is both realistic about the challenges associated with the development of complex reasoning in science, and that is coupled with assessment instruments that are sensitive enough to capture the gradual development of complex reasoning within scientific domains.”
" We’re working with a team at SRI in California to develop sensitive assessments that are able to chronicle inquiry understandings over the course of several units and several years. It’s a whole new plan for studying the development of complex thinking in science.”
In this work, across so many different contexts, in collaboration with so many different people, with ever-evolving technological tools, the questions multiply: questions of a thirteen year old, curious about gray wolves; questions of a middle school teacher, trying to use an interactive CD-ROM for the first time as she plans her lessons; questions of a web designer, a biologist, a developmental psychologist trying to understand how children learn to reason scientifically over multiple years…Questions layered upon even more complicated questions. A vast ocean of wondering.
Click here to learn more about Dr. Songer's projects and research
