This project investigates the use of multimodal representations of concepts in student learning. The concepts are represented by text and by concept maps. The project has two major goals. First is to further the understanding of integrating the conceptual learning from informational text with the experimental and hands-on activities in a design based classes. The enactment of the intervention across different contexts will; be systematically studied by examining the variations in teacher practices, student characteristics, project challenges and aspects of classroom culture that enable students to take advantage of the capabilities of both design activities and the use of the multiple electronic texts. Second is to understand student's changing representations as they use multiple texts in their science explorations. As electronic texts become ubiquitous in educational settings, there is an increasing need to understand how students in project-based and design-based classrooms engage in learning from multiple texts in the context of an inquiry classroom. This project aims to examine student's learning trajectories by taking into consideration the strategies that students use, student characteristics such as prior knowledge, metacognitive awareness, their group interactions and the relationships of these to navigation and learning. The methodology includes rigorous analytical tools systematically studying the enactment of the intervention in a classroom context starting with a focus on classroom dynamics and sequencing. The focus will then move to teacher practices subsequently zooming in on student's knowledge representations. The results will contribute to (i) the scientific knowledge base on integrating informational resources into hands-on science activities (ii) increase an understanding of how students process multiple texts thereby benefiting researchers using hypertext and hypermedia systems and digital libraries (iii) generate a set of pedagogical guidelines for integration of informational resources in scientific inquiry. These will be important contributions to scaling up projects addressing K-12 science education. The intervention will take place in four middle school settings, across different geographical, ethnic, and socioeconomic areas: (a) a rural school in Connecticut; (b) an academically and economically challenged school in Connecticut; (c) an urban school in Wisconsin; and (d) a suburban school also in Wisconsin. Each of these sites will provide natural variability in student preparation and motivation, teacher expertise in the topic, and individual classroom dynamics. During each year of the 5-year project, a study of the factors affecting learning will lead to a set of design principles that can then be applied in other contexts.
