SBIR Phase II: Understanding the Nature of Science

这个小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目将在网络上为中学和中学后的科学教学提供模拟，明确地侧重于让学生了解“科学的本质”。科学的本质意味着，科学发现的基本逻辑和科学的组织方式都围绕着数据和思想的获取和传播。这就是科学学习的大局--建立实验和假设之间的关系；认为理论是模型而不是现实，对理论的检验就是它的预测力。这项研究的重点是对模拟和嵌入其中的课程进行仔细的设计和测试，以确保它们尽可能有效。明天的公民需要知道科学是如何工作的。这个项目将帮助消除对科学知识的起源和范围的危险误解，并为学生提供更有效地评估科学(和准科学)主张的工具。该项目还探索了在教育世界提供教学和商业化的不同寻常的模式：它将使用互联网不提供内容，而是调解模拟并促进小组之间的交流，通常是在一个教室内，而不是更广泛；并将使用订阅--这是一种对教师来说短期内具有成本效益的方式。

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project will deliver simulations over the web for secondary and post-secondary science instruction which focus explicitly on students coming to understand the "nature of science." The nature of science implies that both the underlying logic of scientific discovery and the way that science is organized around the acquisition and dissemination of data and ideas. This is the big picture in science learning -- establishing the relationship between experiments and hypotheses; the idea that theories are models and not reality, and that the test of a theory is its predictive power. The research focuses on the careful design and testing of both the simulations and the lessons in which they are embedded, to ensure that they are as effective as possible.Tomorrow's citizens need to know how science works. This project will help erase dangerous misconceptions about the origins and extent of scientific knowledge, and give students tools to evaluate scientific (and quasi-scientific) claims more effectively. This project also probes unusual models for both delivery of instruction and commercialization in the education world: it will use the Internet not to deliver content but to mediate a simulation and promote inter-group communication, usually within a single classroom rather than more widely; and will do so using subscriptions - a way that is cost-effective to the teacher in the short term.