Bransford 9618248 Two challenges, based on the Jasper Woodbury, the Scientists in Action Series and Project SMART, support middle and high school students doing science and mathematics with understanding rather than just doing. The challenges are featured on the Challenge Zone of the American Schools Directory on the Internet along with the resources specially designed to help students develop understanding of "big ideas" in science and mathematics emphasized in the standards documents. The science challenge provides activities to increase student understanding of river ecology. The mathematics challenge is organized around a series of design tasks that invite students to invent mathematically based tools to solve important classes of problems. The resources include references to existing texts, software, video, Internet sites and suggestions to teachers about ways to use challenges to increase student achievement. Each challenge is divided into a series weekly of sub-challenges for groups of students who respond with the best solution of the class. Other classes can review, comment on and use the solution of any other posted solution. The sub-challenges lead toward a project of local significance that can be done by the class with the results posted on the Web site. Feedback from users is used to refine challenges and resources. Mechanisms are developed to assess to student learning and to evaluate the effects of feedback on the quality of the challenges. A major focus is to determine unique contributions of the Web to classroom learning.
