9804930 Pea Most NSF-funded educational technology projects have created a single software program for a specific subject matter goal. These projects have yielded a valuable base of knowledge about the appropriate use of technology in science and math education. Yet they typically do not already address scale-up or sustainability. Thus, too few products of this research are widely available in the software marketplace or have been integrated with new curricula to meet the challenges of systemic reform. In this project we focus not on a single software need but on the broader problem of how software innovations can accumulate, integrate, and scale up to meet the needs of systemic reform of K-12 mathematics and science education. The Educational Software Components of Tomorrow (ESCOT) project addresses this problem by leveraging an emerging convergence of powerful forces: interactive media, networked communities, and component software technologies. Together, these forces have the potential to reshape the infrastructure for educational software development, resulting in a new network economy that will be designed to meet national needs for educational software with greater efficiency, capacity for innovation and growth, and competitive drive toward quality. Our hypothesis is that the confluence of these forces could provide an infrastructure for sustainable development of software for K-12 systemic reform. ESCOT will pursue four research objectives: (a) form an experimental testbed-a distributed network of teachers, researchers, and developers using a shared collection of software resources-to investigate this hypothesis; (b) develop a mapping between the technology needs of standards-based reform efforts and feasible software modules; (c) identify ways of using the Internet to catalyze distributed, self-organizing integration teams; and (d) analyze mechanisms and design patterns for achieving interoperability among educational software components. Paralleling the initial NSF cur riculum development strategy, the ESCOT testbed begin with existing standards-based middle school mathematics curricula and implementation efforts, with the aim of building knowledge and exemplars that inform policy and practice more broadly across K-12 mathematics and science. In forming and studying the ESCOT testbed, SRI International will team with Swarthmore College, the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, the University of Colorado-Boulder and coordinate with the five NSF-supported middle school mathematics curriculum projects and affiliated implementation center at the University of Missouri. ***
