An electronic newsletter for the science education
community
January/February
2005
PRISMS to Identify Quality Phenomena and Representations
for Teaching
There’s a wealth of information on the Internet
describing scientific phenomena and representations that
teachers could use for classroom instruction. But how
well do these resources address content standards and how
likely are they to help students learn? In a new collaboration
with the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance (MMSA),
Project 2061 will apply its research-based criteria for
analyzing curriculum materials to review Web-based resources
and to organize them into an online collection that can
be easily accessed by middle grades teachers.
Phenomena and Representations for the Instruction of Science
in Middle Schools, or PRISMS, will selectively review
and describe phenomena and representations available on
the Internet to determine whether they are (1) aligned with
state and national content standards; (2) informed by
cognitive research; and (3) likely to improve the quality
of middle school science instruction.
Funded by the National Science Foundation’s (NSF)
National
Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education
Digital Libraries (NSDL) program,
PRISMS is a three-year project designed to increase the
amount of standards-based and pedagogically useful science
content available in the NSDL and other digital libraries
for middle school teachers and students. PRISMS partners
Project 2061 with MMSA,
a not-for-profit statewide science education reform organization
established in 1992 as Maine’s NSF-funded statewide
systemic initiative.
“PRISMS is a logical application to digital media
of the research-based methods that Project 2061 has employed
for curriculum materials analysis. Even though one vision
of the Web paints it as a globally linked mesh of information
that can be processed by machines, there is no substitute
for human methods of judging the content alignment of
online resources and the quality of their instructional
support for teachers,” notes Dr. Francis Molina, Project
2061’s
technology director. “We hope to serve as a model
for other digital libraries of how to select high-quality
online educational resources. PRISMS can foster capacity-building
within the NSDL as more resources are viewed with trained
and critical eyes.”
The Need for Better Resources
PRISMS is
the latest of several NSDL collaborations involving Project
2061 (read recent article on the Strand
Map Service project).
A cadre of middle school teachers will be trained in
Project 2061’s curriculum-materials analysis procedure
so they can evaluate approximately 1,000 phenomena and
representations for their alignment to middle grades
content standards and for the quality of their instructional
support.
The term “phenomena” refers to real-world
objects, systems, and events that provide evidence to
support scientific explanations. While firsthand experiences
with phenomena are an important part of science teaching
and learning, indirect experiences through descriptions
of phenomena, activities related to phenomena, and representations—such
as illustrations, models, and simulations—can also
contribute to students’ development and use of scientific
knowledge. But as Project 2061’s middle
grades science textbooks evaluation revealed, many curriculum
materials fall short in their efforts to present phenomena
and representations in a meaningful way. Teachers will
be able to use the high-quality phenomena and representations
collected in PRISMS to supplement textbook material and
to help clarify important scientific ideas for students.
MMSA has a long history of collaboration with Project
2061. Local teachers are already comfortable using Maine's “crosswalk” document,
which links Maine learning goals to Project 2061’s Benchmarks
for Science Literacy and the National Research Council’s National
Science Education Standards. The pervasive use of laptops
in Maine by both teachers and students will allow the
reviewed resources to be tested in the classroom.
The PRISMS collection of resources will be made available
online. It will include teacher-prepared annotations
detailing classroom experiences with using each phenomenon
or representation, suggestions on how to make it more effective,
and questions that can guide its instructional use. The
PRISMS collection will be sustained through continual input
from other middle school teachers on the usefulness of the
reviewed resources.
# # #
For more information,
please contact:
Principal Investigator: Page Keeley, pkeeley@mmsa.org
Co-Principal Investigators: Francis Eberle, feberle@mmsa.org;
Francis Molina;
Sofia Kesidou
[Table of Contents]
