This project nwill investigate how language minority students appropriate new forms of scientific sense-making through their participation in collaborative scientific inquiry in biology (e.g., ethology, botany, ecology, embryology). The investigation will be anchored in a description of the forms of scientic understanding that Haitian students in grades 5-8 develop and an anlysis of how these emerging forms are socially constructed in classroom settings. In the framework of this project, understanding encompasses: conceptual knowledge in biology, scientific sense-making practices, and epistemological beliefs about science. The proposed work encompasses development of research instruments to probe the various dimensions of students scientic understanding, direct work with bilingual classroom teachers to enhance their competence to teach science as collaborative inquiry, developmental research with children to determine how their scientific understanding changes overtime, and ethnographic research in classrooms to analyze how students scientific understanding is socially constructed. Through empirical study of the ways in which scientific understanding is socially constructed, this research will provide both a theoretical rationale and practical model for building sense-making communities in the science slassroom. It will characterize specific sense-making practices which engender the development of scientific understanding in language minority students. In addition, through its focus on biology, it will contribute to an emerging knowledge base on conceptual change in biology.//
