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Research

Center for Research in Education & Learning & Center for Science Education

My research in science learning is associated with two centers located in Adele Simmons Hall at Hampshire: The Center for Research in Education And Learning (REAL) and the Hampshire Center for Science Education (HCSE). Professor Laura Wenk at Hampshire has been my main collaborator and is largely responsible for much of our best work. Our work at REAL and HCSE has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, and by a grant to Hampshire's 4th President, Greg Prince from the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Model-based Reasoning in Introductory Biology

An ongoing project, supported most recently by a grant from the NSF, is a collaboration with Professor Randy Phillis at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst on orienting large introductory biology courses toward teaching  model-based reasoning. An early paper arguing for this kind of partnership between researchers in the learning sciences and university faculty is here. An argument for teaching model-based reasoning and for its formative and summative assessment is here.

Epistemology & Inquiry-oriented Instruction in College Science Learning

Under two grants from the NSF we initiated research on changes in college students' scientific reasoning skills and in their views of the nature of science. One aspect of the research is an extensive longitudinal interview study of students' scientific epistemologies as they progress through college. The following paper describes the interview protocol and the first results:

Smith, C. L. & Wenk, L. (2006). Relations among three aspects of first-year college students' epistemologies of science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 43(8), 747-785.


Further papers are forthcoming. A short early paper describing our approach can be found here. Some early results on scientific reasoning can be found here. A summary of our first NSF project on inquiry-oriented instruction is here, and of our  NSF project on students' reasoning skills and conceptions of science is here.

Educational Software:
Research & Development

Under our grant from the National Science Foundation to study inquiry-oriented instruction, we also conducted several proof-of-concept software development projects. These projects are briefly described here. CHAT was an inquiry-oriented linguistics learning environment in which students built and tested their own grammars of English. Students could share sentences that their gammars generated and rule systems with each other. Geo Observer, a case-based inquiry environment, prompted to students to describe physical features of natural scenes from photographs and to propose theories of the origins of those physical features, which could be tested against field data that had been collected at the scences.   FOREST was an inquiry-oriented forest ecology simulator that allowed students to vary a set of environmental parameters and simulate forest growth for hundreds of years under differing sets of parameters. The FOREST project was developed further and another NSF grant described here.