Turning Information into Knowledge: Hypermodels for Science Education

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9553438 Horwitz This 36 month project assesses the educational effectiveness of a new paradigm for science education software, the hypermodel. This includes multimedia and animation relating computer representations to corresponding objects and processes in nature. GenScope, a prototype hypermodel for investigating genetics, is currently under development. It supports open-ended exploration at five levels: DNA, chromosomes, organism, pedigree and population thus having applications in molecular biology, cellular biology, physiology, Mendelian inheritance, and population genetics. The GenScope models. The goal of this project is to demonstrate the educational effectiveness of the hypermodel technology as a complement to the traditional textbook and lecture approach and to implement the tools, protocols, and standards necessary to facilitate the creation of others by researchers, teachers, curriculum developers, and students. The project provides networking support to share data, parts of models and full models. In addition to some technical gains in multimedia and networked models, the project will examine the impact of the multi-level hypermodel on individual student's understanding. The "seamless" levels allow students to delve into why something happens on more and more fundamental levels, ultimately down to the molecular. Conversely, students can look at the impacts and generalize from the specific to more general cases by moving up levels from the molecular to the most general, populations. This project will define which content and reasoning skills are pertinent and should be studied in the research. It will determine which of these "elicit which components of understanding." ***