IdeaKeeper
For K-12 students to engage in substantive science inquiry, they must have supportive tools for such challenging intellectual activity. The NSDL can give students access to a range of scientific information. However, the NSDL must also go beyond search services to support learners in analyzing and synthesizing the information they find in libraries with respect to the scientific driving questions they are investigating. IdeaKeeper is an effort to address these additional learner needs. IdeaKeeper will have two components:
(1) The development of specialized scaffolded analysis and synthesis services for K-12 science learners. IdeaKeeper will have extensible scaffolds to support students in analyzing NSDL resources and synthesizing the information into arguments addressing their driving questions. We will contribute IdeaKeeper to the NSDL for other learners to use and other researchers to extend with new functionalities and scaffolds.
(2) Deployment of IdeaKeeper in middle school classrooms to assess its impact on learners and to articulate possible new scaffolds and capabilities for future versions. We hope to not only describe the utility of IdeaKeeper, but also to extend scaffolding research for other related projects.
Thus IdeaKeeper can act as a guidepost to services that can more effectively support science inquiry. Not only will we try to identify "what works" with IdeaKeeper, we hope to illuminate new kinds of support or functionalities to consider for learners.
Funder: |
National Science Foundation |
Principal Investigators: |
Chris Quintana |
Partner Organizations: |
University Corporation for Atmospheric Research |
Status: |
Ongoing. |