SCOPE keeps eye on science

By Steve Hill
University Week

A group of educators hopes its new method will create controversy in the classroom. That’s right, controversy - and enhanced learning - in the classroom.

Education professors from the UW and the University of California, Berkeley are collaborating with editors at Science magazine in an effort to add scientific controversies into the mix of science education. The project, which is funded with a $1.8 million National Science Foundation grant, is called Science Controversies Online: Partnerships in Education, or SCOPE. It will be featured at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference later this month in San Francisco.

SCOPE is focused on helping K-12 students across the country understand the process by which scientific knowledge is discovered, tested, refined and applied. Controversial issues, like genetically modified foods, make science more relevant and interesting for students, according to Philip Bell, a UW assistant professor who does cognitive studies in education and who is one of the principal investigators for the project.

“It’s a real problem that students rarely see the way that scientific understanding unfolds over time,” Bell said recently from his Miller Hall office. “In most curriculum materials, they get the settled story. They get, ‘Here’s what we know about this topic. Remember that and we’ll ask you about it later.’ What they rarely get is to know how we came to that understanding about the natural world.”

And that science-in-the-making approach, Bell says, is what truly engages students. Exploring the process in which science and knowledge unfold through a series of tests and debates adds an element of intrigue to the study of science.

“Often, that’s a controversial process,” Bell said. “There might be two competing explanations about why something is happening and maybe there’s not enough data collected at that point - and yet a policy decision has to be made. Part of what we’re trying to do is bring students into that process.”

They’ve done so by designing Web-based forums and curricula that put students into the heart of a variety of debates: Should the dangerous pesticide DDT be globally banned even though it saves thousands of lives each year from malaria? Why are amphibians around the world disappearing? And, most recently, do the benefits of genetically engineering food crops outweigh the potential detrimental impacts on the environment and human health?

The Web environment provides students with links to a wealth of popular press and academic journal information on the controversies. Students learn about the work of scientists and other stakeholders from around the world who are involved in the controversial issues. According to one of the scientists who participates, SCOPE has given researchers the opportunity to keep the public informed about one of today’s most controversial scientific issues.

“Scientists have special responsibilities to keep the public informed about the scientific issues behind the (genetically modified foods) debate,” Jian-Kang Zhu, a researcher at the University of Arizona, said. “An important challenge in doing that is to reach out to the public and get relevant information out to more people. I certainly hope the SCOPE projects will contribute to that.”

How best to frame the controversies is another aspect of the work that intrigues Bell. SCOPE gives the former software engineer and the other researchers a chance to explore the best ways for information technology to support science learning and, ultimately they hope, learning in several subject areas. They’ve been working to refine SCOPE’s Web-based learning environment for the last six years.

“Part of our research is focused on exploring how learning technologies can uniquely support students as they learn science,” Bell said. “This is a research endeavor for us but it’s also a design endeavor because the technologies that we want to explore often don’t exist yet, or they don’t exist in the right form for us to be using as part of our work. So we actually go in and develop new pieces of technology for kids to use and then do research around how it goes once it’s in a classroom or some other learning environment.”

So far, there are encouraging signs. Bell thinks the Web-based approach will continue to be useful for science education.

“Part of what we do is use the technology to support kids in building arguments and having rich debates about these topics,” he said. “That type of thing - asking kids to build arguments and debate with one another - obviously isn’t only appropriate to science. You can find mathematicians doing that. You can find historians doing that. So, this might work to support kids in other disciplines as well.” Only further research will tell.

Bell and seven other researchers will discuss SCOPE and the genetically modified foods controversy from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Feb. 20 at the AAAS annual meeting in San Francisco. Information about SCOPE can be found online at http://scope.educ.washington.edu/.