The science education community and the published American standards about science literacy call for students to learn important science concepts and the skills involved in scientific reasoning in ways that allow them to apply what they are learning in new situations. The science education literature has identified classroom practices that seem essential to such deep and transferable learning. Several approaches to inquiry-driven project-based science have been designed based on these recommendations, and results show that when carried out by masterful teachers, both science content and practices are well learned. But we don't know the developmental course of scientific reasoning skills when they are learned in a classroom context engineered for their transferable learning. Nor do we know the conditions that need to be in place to allow teachers and students to make best use of project-based learning's affordances. For the past five years, the Learning by Design group at Georgia Tech has been designing an inquiry-oriented project-based approach to middle-school science learning informed by research on how people learn. Our team has designed sequences of classroom practices that, as a system, promote deep understanding and lasting and reusable learning. The trends in our data suggest that science learning in our LBD classrooms is more comprehensive and more likely to transfer than the learning in more standard inquiry-oriented science classrooms. We propose to use the infrastructure of LBD, our local LBD classrooms, and our cross-disciplinary team to investigate issues with respect to promoting transfer using a project-based inquiry approach, focusing especially on the learning of scientific reasoning skills and practices. Our Quadrant 2 questions ask about the development of scientific reasoning skills in a project-based science classroom, aiming to provide a bridge from basic research in cognitive science on transfer, scientific reasoning, and learning to the pragmatics of transfer and learning in the real world of the classroom. Our Quadrant 3 questions ask about conditions that need to be in place in the classroom for learning and transfer of science practices to occur. Scientific reasoning skills are difficult to measure, but we have had some success in showing the acquisition of these skills by the students in our LBD classrooms. The challenge we take on here is to explore the development of this type of reasoning in middle school children at a fine-grained level. We will use a combination of design experiments and micro-genetic analysis. We are aiming to use our LBD classrooms to find out more about the cognitive and socio-cognitive processes involved in learning science practices with several goals in mind: (i) better understanding of the processes involved in learning to reason scientifically; (ii) better understanding of classroom practices that will promote transferable learning; and (iii) the generation of guidelines for project-based science classrooms, about how to promote transferable learning of science practices.
