This project is investigating the cognitive and motivational development of diverse groups of high school students as they work with highly visual, dynamic simulations of the laws of random phenomena as exhibited in a wide variety of physical, biological and chemical systems. Students manipulate models of physical reality in a fashion similar to the modelling methods used by the research scientists who are conducting this project. The investigators hypothesize that students underrepresented in mathematics and science, including women and minorities, will particularly benefit from these visualization tools and from their participation in current scientific research. Research questions include the following: What is the cognitive significance of pairing hands-on experiments with compute models in learning activity? What are the cognitive consequences for students of working with dynamic, time-dependent representations of systems and phenomena that are impossible to represent directly in prose or still photographs? What are the consequences of multiple representations, such as liquid water viewed at a microscopic and macroscopic levels? What are the central anchoring concepts students need in order to use dynamic visual models to explore and understand both the scientific processes of modeling and the concepts of randomness and order in nature? What are the consequences for high school students and teachers of cognitive apprenticeships with graduate students who are carrying out the research modeled in the teaching materials?//
