![[Table of Contents]](/icons/up.gif){kind=icon}
Learning Circles--The AT&T Learning Network links classes from geographically diverse locations into "learning circles" to accomplish shared educational goals (Riel 1991a). The network matches teachers and their students with seven to nine other classrooms that share academic interests but represent different geographic or cultural perspectives. As noted in Chapter II, each classroom within a learning circle has the opportunity to design projects and request information from the other circle partners for these projects. Examples of student-conducted research projects include how weather and seasonal patterns affect the daily lives of people in different locations, the influence of mass media on children's lives, and a survey of cities in transition (Riel 1990a; 1990b). Students in New York, Australia, and Canada, as well as other distant locations, researched and then traded stories about the history of their own communities. After collecting the information from their distant partners via the telecommunications network, the students worked with the information they received--analyzing, evaluating, synthesizing, and eventually publishing the project in a cooperative learning circle publication.
A learning circle network fosters authentic inquiry-based learning by providing real purpose, motivation, and audience for students to conduct research and write to one another. Students are not working on arbitrary assignments but on novel tasks that were designed by their learning circle partners.
The telecommunications environment provides students with opportunities to develop new awareness and appreciation of individual differences that teachers could not provide within the boundaries of their own classrooms. Research suggests that students are better able to function as an intellectual critic for distant peers than for themselves or classmates and that they learn to write better when physical distance makes clear the need to provide explicit content for the reader (Riel 1992). An additional advantage is that physical and sensory limitations become "invisible" in this medium, since the recipients of messages in one classroom do not know what special efforts the senders may have made in order to communicate. In one learning circle, a classroom sent around an introductory packet about themselves to the other classes, including an audiotape of stories from the class. Another class in the circle was made up of hearing-impaired students who wrote back a cogent and personal statement about what it is like to be deaf and how they are often treated as stupid (Riel 1992).
Riel (1990b) finds that relationships between students and their teachers change in learning circle projects. The teacher becomes a learner alongside students as each classroom designs activities for the learning circle and participates in other circle partners' investigations. Unlike a typical self-contained lesson in which the classroom teacher plans and implements an activity, individual classroom teachers do not have total control over the direction of a learning circle project. They do not know what students and teachers in other locations will contribute to the process and cannot predict the exact course the project will take. Instead, the students see the teachers in the role of a participant in the learning process. In this role, the teacher serves as a model of active learning setting a powerful example for students.
TERC Network Science Programs--Over the past decade, Technical Educational Research Centers (TERC) has been linking groups of classrooms to each other and to professional scientists who can help students explore pressing global questions. TERC's network science programs are based on the premise that students can carry out scientific investigations with real scientists and that computers can enhance this enterprise (Julyan 1991). Students conduct experiments, analyze data, and share results with their colleagues using a simple computer-based telecommunications network. This collecting and making sense of data gives the students an opportunity "to experience the excitement of science that scientists feel" (Julyan 1991, p. 5).
Kids Network. One of the TERC network projects, the National Geographic Kids Network, involves students and teachers across the United States and in a number of foreign countries working collaboratively on science projects (TERC 1990). The project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Geographic Society (NGS) and is now published by NGS. The initial unit of the Kids Network involved teachers and students in fourth through sixth grade from 200 schools in a study of acid rain. Students collected data on the pH of their local water, then shared this data with the other schools on the telecommunications network. Using a word processor, data/record-keeping software, graphing utility, map software with data overlay, and telecommunications package (Julyan 1991), students were able to display their own data and the combined data from other schools in tables, graphs, and maps and then compare and analyze the data. The scientist who was involved in the project communicated with the students over the network, answering questions, commenting on their data, and suggesting ways they might analyze their data (Lenk 1988).
Since that initial unit, TERC has developed five other units for fourth- through sixth-grade students. Each unit involves students examining the topic in their local community and then guides them in expanding the inquiry by sharing data with other students in distant locations (Julyan 1991). The themes of the curriculum units are "Too Much Trash", "What's in Our Water?", "Weather in Action", "What are We Eating?", and "Solar Energy." Whenever possible, a professional scientist is involved in the unit, communicating with students over the network. Currently, TERC is developing nine Kids Network units for sixth- through ninth-grade classrooms, beginning with a unit on the human body.
TERC Star Schools. TERC developed another network project, the Star Schools project, involving secondary students and teachers from across the country and recognized resource centers. These groups collaborated to create a new learning environment in which students work together to tackle compelling problems, such as measuring radon levels in their schools, designing solar houses, collecting weather data, and exploring mathematical chaos (Berger 1989). Teachers feel that this environment allows students to realize that important problems are complex and may have more than one solution.
Earth Lab--The initial and primary goal of the Earth Lab project, directed by Denis Newman of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc., was to create classroom environments in which students used collaborative workspaces to learn elementary earth science in much the same way as scientists do (Newman 1992a). All of the computers in the school were connected via a local area network (LAN) to a hard-disk drive, which allowed for central storage of data, text, and programs. A network interface such as this makes it very easy for individuals or groups to store and retrieve data that pertains to their projects. Students and teachers can be assigned to any number of independent or collaborative workspaces.
Although the most obvious effect of these computer-supported, global laboratories is that they open the boundaries of the classroom to global investigations, Newman's work shows that they are also affecting boundaries between classrooms and subject areas within the school. When teachers had access to the Earth Lab network, they created environments for teaching and learning that were decompartmentalized (Newman 1990a). Students in the network were more likely to carry their work from one context to another. They continued to work on assignments, both individually and cooperatively, even after class periods ended, on whatever computer they found available. Since their workspaces were always accessible from any computer, students had greater autonomy to choose when to continue work on their projects. As a result, the computer lab was increasingly used in a heterogeneous manner with groups of students from several classes working on different projects simultaneously.
Ironically, in opening up boundaries between the school and other parts of the globe, communication boundaries also appeared to shift between teachers and students in local schools. As part of the Earth Lab project, the electronic mail system was made available for both student and teacher use. Researchers found that students and teachers carried on individual conversations, something that rarely occurred in the regular classroom (Newman 1990a; 1992a).
Geometric Supposer--Geometric Supposer is a set of microcomputer software tools developed by Judah Schwartz and Michal Yerushalmy to teach high school geometry through a guided-inquiry approach. The Supposers allow the user to make geometric constructions of the sort created with a compass and straightedge. The software includes a facility to measure angles, areas, and line segments and to perform arithmetic operations on these numerical data. The software remembers a construction as a procedure and allows the user to repeat the construction on another geometric figure of the same sort (Wiske & Houde 1988). Students engage in inductive thinking and have a chance to reinvent definitions and theorems and to explore new and interesting and complex geometric ideas (Yerushalmy, Chazan & Gordon 1988).
In a year-long research project on the implementation of a guided inquiry approach using Geometric Supposer in three Boston area suburbs during the 1985-86 school year, project staff assessed student learning and examined implementation issues (Yerushalmy, Chazan & Gordon 1988). Interviews with a sample of "best" and "worst" students found that students had no technical difficulties with the software. However, nearly all students found the guided-inquiry approach more difficult than traditional, textbook mathematics and experienced some frustration. Many found conjecture-making difficult, and in general students voiced a need for direction and guidance. Some students became adept at stepping back to observe the teacher role and think about the kind of support that they needed. They did not want simplification of the problem or step-by-step procedures as much as a clearer sense of direction and close support as they began a challenge:
[If I were teaching] when I started out, I would discuss it more; I'd show more of how to do things. Then as you got more and more into the thing, I'd ease off and let people figure it out for themselves.
The researchers found that in general students understood the power of the guided-inquiry approach and enjoyed learning that way, particularly when they were successful. They liked working with the computer, using the tools to make conjectures, and felt that they grasped the content more deeply as a result. At times, they had a real experience of discovery. Some students found themselves using conjectural thinking beyond the mathematics classroom:
If somebody, a teacher or anybody, tells you something, you think maybe it could be this. You have a bunch ofideas. Not just two, but a bunch of them. You re thinking what could be the reason for it? You have a list of ideas going through your mind. Then you sit down and play it out or figure it out.
I always make conjectures now about little things. I don't know. It's very have to explain. I ll be in another class. You see how things work, so you make a conjecture and you generalize about other things. Especially in biology because it's life in general. It's so interesting. You can just make conjectures.
The research found that teachers using Geometric Supposer through a guided-inquiry approach need to strike a productive balance between providing thoughtful guidance and freedom for students to investigate their own ideas, falling neither into intellectual tyranny nor into abdication of responsibility (Wiske 1990, p. 8). Teachers need to be "active learners in the classroom, modeling the activities of wondering, conjecturing, being mistaken or stymied, and proceeding without knowing whether they were on the right track" (Wiske 1990, p. 8).
Microcomputer-Based Laboratories--As described in Chapter II, microcomputer-based laboratories (MBLs) are tools teachers can bring into the classroom to expand the range of students learning in science. These tools can include a dozen sensors, a lab interface, and a low-cost microcomputer, allowing students to have measurement and computational power that can support projects where they do actual measurements. Tinker and Papert (1989) point out that MBL is a realization of an earlier dream of science educators: a flexible instrument that speeds up computations related to force, light, pressure, temperature, heart rate, speed, etc. Equally important, the instrument leaves students the choice about what computations to use (p. 9).
Although the MBL equipment can facilitate open-ended exploration, the laboratory lessons used by teachers typically direct students to gather and analyze specific data as they perform particular experiments (Wiske, Niguidula & Shepard 1988, p. 7). The MBL lessons are based on the belief that students today hold many of the misconceptions about heat and temperature once held by scientists. Simple instruction will not change deeply held misconceptions; rather, experiments need to stimulate students to fundamentally reorganize their understanding. This view echoes a constructionist perspective (Papert 1988) that students learn best through active engagement in their own studies in an environment that encourages them to construct and communicate their own knowledge and understandings. Consistent with this perspective, some of the experiments that helped earlier scientists begin to question their concepts of thermal physics are incorporated into these materials, so that students can actively examine and reconstruct their own understanding (Wiske, Niguidula & Shepard 1988).
Use of MBLs in schools with teachers and students indicates that real and accurate measurements motivate students, especially if student work mirrors scientific research. However, field testing has also revealed that teachers need to structure the environment to make learning efficient. Teachers have noted how important it is for students to communicate findings through class discussion, writing in lab guides, or informal student conversation in small groups.
[Challenges for Students Using Technology]
This page was last updated December 27, 2001 (jca)