CLEAR’s three main goals:

1. Improve the cumulative learning of students in the topic area of energy.

Traditionally, there has seldom been the expectation of students applying concepts learned in prior units to the next topic or course. To remedy this situation, we explored ways to ensure that science learning is cumulative. Cumulative learning involves retaining instructed material and building on it.

Delving into this question raised many issues such as: What sorts of ideas should be retained? What sort of understanding do we desire of students after several years of instruction? How can instruction enable students to appreciate the ubiquitous role of fundamental science concepts like energy? How can we help students understand the dependencies and connections across science topics and disciplines? What are key features of cumulative learning? What is the trajectory of a cumulative learner?

2. Design and customize technology-enhanced instructional materials, consistent with California standards, to foster cumulative understanding of energy.

From our prior work on knowledge integration, we know that students come to science class with a repertoire of disconnected and often contradictory ideas. We wanted to spur students to develop more coherent ideas and enable them to integrate their ideas and promote the most fruitful, generative, and useful ideas. We aimed to help students distinguish new ideas from existing ideas and reconcile discrepancies with scientific evidence. We expect that cumulative learners would test and refine their ideas by applying them in situations they encounter in their lives. Ideally cumulative learners would continue to expand, refine, and integrate their understanding all during their lives. Our curriculum materials and professional development implemented the patterns and principles developed to support knowledge integration. We worked to develop criteria for effective instructional materials. Questions included: What sorts of learning activities and topic sequences contribute to cumulative learning? What role can inquiry with visualizations and virtual experiments and connections to everyday experiences play? How can teachers support cumulative learning? How can regular use of a technology-enhanced learning environment that tracks student progress support cumulative learning?

3. Design and implement a suite of assessments that monitor progress of participants and also serve as learning events Knowledge integration assessments require generation of explanations. They have acceptable psychometric properties and can be distinguished from typical multiple-choice items used in international tests. Embedded assessments in WISE also serve as learning activities. Typically, pairs of students perform these activities. They require generation of ideas, a valuable learning activity. To take advantage of recent technological advances, we can now track student activities. For example, we can record the experiments that students conduct and reliably capture inquiry activities. And we can determine the conditions under which students return to a visualization or evidence page. For CLEAR, we developed two new item types called Energy Stories and MySystem. These items are intended to capture longer sequences of reasoning. Energy Stories overlap with some of the knowledge integration items we have used in the past. MySystem is intended to enable students to visually represent connections between energy sources, energy transfer, and energy transformations. It was inspired by modeling environments such as STELLA or Model-It but is much less sophisticated.