CAREER: Designing Hypertext Materials for the Science Classroom: Understanding Students' Changing Cognitive Representations

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My research and teaching plans are geared towards designing and implementing online science resources to help students learn science, and providing professional development activities for teachers. My plans integrate an interdisciplinary approach to designing and using hypertext resources in science classrooms, evaluating the cognitive demands of student learning while using such material, as well as associated professional development initiatives for teachers. The aims of my research plan are: (1) Design, implement and evaluate hypertext material for the science classroom. These materials will focus on helping students understand interrelationships between principles and concepts so that they learn science as an integrated body of knowledge, not as a set of isolated facts. There are numerous interrelationships that students need to understand in order to effectively use and do science. For example, in understanding planets, physics shades into chemistry, astronomy, and geology, and biology shades into chemistry, in understanding osmosis. (2) Through empirical studies, understand students' changing cognitive representations as they learn from these materials. This will help not only in understanding student learning but will also help understand how students learn from hypertext materials, thus providing guidelines for better design.My teaching plan has the following aims. (1) Continue developing the graduate program in Instructional Media and Technology. (2) Integrate professional development activities for teachers along with design and implementation of research materials. (3) Build an interdisciplinary team of students to enable the design and integration of technology in science classrooms.