Six Indiana school districts, in partnership with industry, universities, libraries, data retrieval services, and a museum will develop and implement programs to give middle school students experience in computer data processing and literature searching. Through a summer workshop teachers from the school district will work with industry and university scientists to design scientific studies their students can pursue, both by data-generating experiments and by literature searching. Teachers, and in turn their students, will learn how to create data bases for their own results and how to access and search commercial data bases for complementary information. During the summer workshop the teachers will have an opportunity to test their programs on students in a museum prior to taking these programs back to their own classrooms. Materials and procedures developed during the project will be widely disseminated. Cost sharing by the partners will total 17% of the NSF funding.
