SBIR Phase II: Understanding the Nature of Science

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will deliver simulations over the web for secondary and post-secondary science instruction which focus explicitly on students coming to understand the "nature of science." The nature of science implies that both the underlying logic of scientific discovery and the way that science is organized around the acquisition and dissemination of data and ideas. This is the big picture in science learning -- establishing the relationship between experiments and hypotheses; the idea that theories are models and not reality, and that the test of a theory is its predictive power. The research focuses on the careful design and testing of both the simulations and the lessons in which they are embedded, to ensure that they are as effective as possible. Tomorrow's citizens need to know how science works. This project will help erase dangerous misconceptions about the origins and extent of scientific knowledge, and give students tools to evaluate scientific (and quasi-scientific) claims more effectively. This project also probes unusual models for both delivery of instruction and commercialization in the education world: it will use the Internet not to deliver content but to mediate a simulation and promote inter-group communication, usually within a single classroom rather than more widely; and will do so using subscriptions - a way that is cost-effective to the teacher in the short term.