Inquiring minds: the UC Berkeley School of Education is helping K-12 school districts integrate Palm handhelds into an innovative Web-based science program.

If you visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium last year, you might have encountered a group of high school students staring into the 90-foot-long, 326,000-gallon Monterey Bay Habitats exhibit. Or looking into the Outer Bay exhibit where sunfish, sharks, tunas, barracudas, sea turtles and dolphinfish swim. Or peering into the towering 280-foot-high Kelp Forest display. You might have seen them recording their observations on Palm handheld computers and wondering just what they were doing.

They were doing original research to try to determine how important it is to save certain fish species. Back at school, they would upload their observations from the aquarium to a special server and begin to answer important questions like, "Why should we care if some fish species are disappearing?"

Several groups of local high-school students have completed such investigations. This work is just one of several projects being developed by the UC Berkeley School of Education to help K-12 schools extend the study of science beyond the classroom to engage students in learning that makes science more interesting and accessible. It's called WISE, the Web-based Inquiry Science Environment.

"This project represents a revolutionary integration of handheld activities into a broader instructional context," says Jim Slotta, researcher and lecturer at the UC Berkeley School of Education and director of the WISE project. "Students collaborate to use Internet materials and incorporated an observational activity at a museum setting, then use their aggregate data to think about difficult science concepts."

WISE Provides the Framework

WISE is a free, online learning environment tailored for students in grades 4-12 (wise.berkeley.edu). UC Berkeley started the project in 1998, building prior research into science-inquiry frameworks.

Slotta's team expanded the Scaffolded Knowledge Integration Framework to support science-inquiry projects that feature hands-on lab activities and field trips. This framework focuses on making science accessible and more visible, while fostering the social supports that promote lifelong learning. The program also builds on the Knowledge Integration Environment project, which researched Internet usage for science curriculum. Finally, the team created a special browser-based learning environment for middle and high school students.

In WISE, students work on projects that focus on contemporary issues like genetically modified foods, earthquake prediction, creek health or the controlling of malaria. They use tailored online tools pro-incorporated into the environment: journaling, online discussions, causal maps, data visualizations and the Sensemaker argument editor.

Teachers can choose from a wide range of projects to implement the program. All have been developed in partnerships between scientists from many agencies, such as NASA, NOAA and the National Geographic Society. Instructors also can monitor and grade student work, provide feedback and manage students' accounts online.

In June 2001, the UC Berkeley School of Education became a Palm Education Pioneer (PEP) Research Hub. Palm Inc.'s PEP program supports research institutions, school districts and schools of education committed to training and supporting teachers who use handheld technology to enhance learning.

"We wanted to further the use of Palm handhelds by integrating them into the curriculum," says Slotta. "The WISE project would provide a coherent framework while the handhelds would enable data-collection activities, like surveys and field observations, and reflection activities in analyzing the data."

The department used its grant of 500 Palm handhelds from the PEP program to research how WISE and Palm technology could work together. They partnered with two large school districts to explore the effectiveness of their designs in a wide range of classroom contexts. They also joined with science discipline experts and agencies, like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, to develop compelling projects.

WISE has since grown dramatically, both in the size of its project library and in the numbers of its participants. Thousands of teachers and students have used the program.

Meeting the Challenges of Science Education

It can be difficult for students to grasp complex biological and ecological concepts. Slotta and his research team determined that a knowledge-integration approach helps students develop a stronger understanding of such difficult concepts. So they designed the WISE curriculum to facilitate that process.

Two school districts are currently partnering with the university: Denver (Colo.) Public Schools and Desert Sands (Calif.) Unified School District. Working closely with administrators and educators, researchers have helped science teachers integrate these activities into their courses and schedules. Plus, networks of WISE mentors within each district provide support.

"Interaction between students is essential to successfully incorporating WISE and handheld technology into the science curriculum," says Slotta. "Students work in pairs and this close collaboration encourages them to share ideas and support each other."

The projects are built to encourage interactions between students and teachers. This encourages constructive social interactions like problem-solving, debate, discussion and other collaborative work.

Researchers identified four features that could enhance student learning when they sought to integrate the use of Palm handhelds into the project: portability enables remote activities like surveys, observations and data collection; beaming allows students and teachers to exchange information or receive supplemental information; touch-screen technology provides effective data input; and the one-touch HotSync process enables data upload and download from a PC or the Web.

Drawing on these basics, the researchers adapted existing Palm handheld applications to their science-learning needs and developed a few new ones.

The team also pioneered new approaches allowing Web forms to be downloaded to a Palm handhold for data-collection use on field trips or for surveys. Finally, a versatile, collaborative database was built for WISE data. Researchers designed it to collect and analyze any sort of data in any context--text, numbers, radio buttons, checkboxes, pop-up menus and lists.

In Action: Monterey Bay Aquarium

The Monterey Bay Aquarium project was the first to involve downloading questionnaires into handhelds. With the aquarium staff's support, the team at UC Berkeley has worked with several teachers to develop a curriculum project around the concepts of habitat adaptation. Educators from the aquarium wanted to help students focus on marine science concepts, including the factors relating to the decline of fish populations. They co-designed an activity where students explore the fish in Monterey Bay, reflecting on why some fish are placed on a "seafood watch list" while others are not. Students chose one to investigate at the aquarium.

For the first two days, students worked in pairs exploring concepts of fish adaptation. They critiqued Web resources, took reflective notes, organized their thoughts and visualized their arguments using Sensemaker software. On the third day, the students visited the aquarium where they collected observational data on their fish species' adaptation, using special observation forms that had been downloaded into their Palm handhelds.

When they returned to the classroom, they uploaded data from the handhelds into WISE via the HotSync process. The program then gave the information back to students in a classroom data set. This allowed students to view and manipulate their data, and the data of their classmates, with tools and representations developed by WISE researchers. Thus, students could test their ideas about adaptation and conservation, and draw their own connections between fish population decline and adaptations to habitat.

This seafood watch curriculum has been run several times with high school biology students and with students from an oceanography club at a local high school. Pro-tests and post-tests were administered, coded and scored. Students' reflection notes were also analyzed. Post tests in all of these areas have shown significant improvements in student knowledge and understanding. Teachers have also commented that students often refer back to concepts of adaptation and conservation long after the project ended.

"During the visit to the aquarium, students were not only eager to use the Palms, they quickly adapted to the Palm platform and collected data faster than we expected," notes Slotta, "All students were successful in collecting useful data--and often collected data on more than their two species because they wanted to."

In Action: The Living Desert & Healthy Creeks

Other projects incorporate this kind of structure for science inquiry. A teacher from the Desert Sands Unified School District recently conducted a similar program with The Living Desert Museum in Palm Desert, Calif. Students prepared for a field trip to this wilderness preserve, used Palm handhelds to record their observations of desert plants, animals and landscape, and returned to the classroom to upload their data for analysis.

In the Healthy Creeks project, students can either collect data on-site using dedicated probeware or simply by typing in their pH findings. Back in class, they analyze the variance among their class and how it relates to other classes. Using data-analysis tools, students can further explore their information, such as comparing the average pit of the creek each month for the past two years. Many teachers across the country have gauged a local creek's water quality in this way.

In Action: The Malaria Project

Another approach being used in WISE integrates existing Palm applications to provide an additional level of inquiry, context and guidance. One project involves the Cooties application, through which students learn about the mathematics of infectious diseases by beaming an imaginary disease (Cooties) around the classroom. (Cooties, from the University of Michigan's Hi-CE project; now public-domain software at www.goknow.com). Researchers adapted Cooties to use in the Cycles o Malaria curriculum.

Teachers in middle and high school biology, and advanced placement biology, have all used the Cycles of Malaria Students debate three different approaches for controlling malaria worldwide: developing an effective pesticide that targets the anopheles mosquito; developing a vaccine against the disease; and creating social program that reduce exposure to mosquitoes Students are directed to explore evidence relating to each control method and debate alternative approaches.

It was simple to add the Cooties activity to this project. A few student were picked to roam around the room as "mosquitoes." They varied the number of mosquitoes and always started with one (hidden) sick person and a disease-incubation time of one minute. The handhelds would display the data as it changed. Over the next minute, the rest of the class would discover whether they had become infected, as the incubation time of the last person bitten expired. With only a single mosquito, the result of one minute's play were that few people became sick, since the mosquito likely did not bite the sick person. With two mosquitoes, the number of sick after one minute quickly increases. With four mosquitoes, the entire class is typically sick after a minute's play.

This activity vividly demonstrated the powerful role the mosquito plays as the sole vector of this terrible disease. More importantly, its incorporation into a WISE project provided an important inquiry context for an otherwise abstract activity. Researchers noted substantial interest from students and teachers, with apparent positive impact on their awareness about mosquitoes as disease vectors.

Compelling Combination for Learning

"The WISE learning environment and handheld computers are synergistic," says Slotta. "The handheld offers mobility to students for collecting real-world data and observations, while WISE provides the scaffolding to give these data pedagogical value. By integrating them, we have been able to create exciting educational opportunities."

Slotta says he believes ubiquitous access to portable handheld computers can extend the functionality of high-quality curriculum. The features that Palm handhelds offer--touch screens, reaming, HotSync, mobility--allow for new types of curricular activities not possible on desktop or laptop computers. Handhelds allow for the collection and aggregation of data that can be used for in-depth investigation of difficult science concepts, he adds.

"There are a few key ingredients for a successful implementation of handhelds," notes Slotta. "Professional development is essential, as well as the need to incorporate handhelds into meaningful learning contexts. Projects like WISE and partnerships like the PEP Research Hub program are providing investigations into the best ways to integrate technology for real learning. This kind of research leads to continual improvement in the field."

RELATED ARTICLE: Integrating formal and informal learning contexts.

Scaffolded Knowledge Integration: A three-phase curriculum.

The research team at the UC Berkeley School of Education designed a curriculum for the Monterey Bay Aquarium project that integrates Palm handheld computers into their Web-based Inquiry Science Environment. WISE includes three phases:

1. Pro-visit preparation phase

This phase includes a two-day WISE curriculum that introduces students to concepts of adaptation they'll encounter during the visit. This includes knowledge-building activities that focus on different expressions of fish adaptation such as anatomical features (e.g., body shape, coloration), behavior patterns (e.g., hiding, schooling) and "life cycle" adaptations (e.g., number of young, size of young, life span).

2. Visit phase

The second phase is the visit to the aquarium. Here students actively use their handhelds to collect data on anatomical, behavioral and life-cycle adaptations on two fish species found on the seafood watch chart. Students must find their fish, then follow the data-collection instructions on their handhelds.

3. Post-visit integration phase

Phase three is the post-visit integration phase. This is where the students view their data and are asked to teach others in their class why a particular fish occurs on the "avoid" or "best" part of the seafood watch chart. During this activity, they must support their assertions with the data collected during the visit as well as evidence from the pre-visit phase using WISE. This approach has also been used recently in a new project in partnership with the Desert Sands Unified School District and The Living Desert Museum, in Palm Desert, Calif.

Gina Adams Palmer is a freelance writer focusing on education. She is based in Los Gatos, California.