Helping students develop criteria for judgment and apply examination skills is essential for promoting scientific literacy. With the increasing availability of the Internet, it is even more essential that students learn how to evaluate the science they gather from online resources. This is particularly true because publishing information on the…

The d'Arbeloff Interactive Mathematics Project or d'AIMP is an initiative that seeks to enhance and ultimately transform the teaching and learning of introductory mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A result of this project is a suite of "mathlets," a carefully developed set of dynamic computer applets for use in the…

INTEGRITY, an item analysis and statistical collusion detection (answer copying) online application, was reviewed. Features of the software and examples of program output are described in detail. INTEGRITY was found to be easily utilized with an abundance of well-organized documentation and built-in features designed to guide the user through the…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of tutorial and edutainment design of instructional software programs related to the "cell division" topic on student achievements, misconceptions and attitudes. An experimental research design including the cell division achievement test (CAT), the cell division concept test (CCT) and…

Despite a rise in the use of handheld computers in classrooms, meaningful learning with personal digital assistant (PDA) technology remains poorly studied. This article reports results from an evaluation of customized handheld data collection software, the BioKIDS Sequence, which was used during an 8-week biodiversity curriculum unit by 5th and…

WebQuests are activities in which students use Web resources to learn about school topics. WebQuests are advocated as constructivist activities and ones generally well regarded by students. Two experiments were conducted in school settings to compare learning using WebQuests versus conventional instruction. Students and teachers both enjoyed…

Describes a novel modeling and simulation package and assesses its impact on students' understanding of chemistry. Connected Chemistry was implemented inside the NetLogo modeling environment. Using Connected Chemistry, students employed problem -solving techniques characterized by stronger attempts at conceptual understanding and logical…

This article describes practical issues related to the design and the development of a Web-Based Learning Environment (Web-LE) for high school students. The purpose of the Fossilization Web-LE was to help students understand the process of fossilization, which is a complex phenomenon and is affected by many factors. The instructional design team…

This paper describes part of a project called Modeling Across the Curriculum which is a large-scale research study in 15 schools across the United States. The specific data presented and discussed here in this paper is based on BioLogica, a hypermodel, interactive environment for learning genetics, which was implemented in multiple classes in…

Explorer is an interactive environment based on a constructivist epistemology of learning that integrates animated computer models with analytic capabilities for learning science. The system includes graphs, a spreadsheet, scripting, and interactive tools. Two examples involving the dynamics of colliding objects and electric circuits illustrate…