Barbara Y. White

• PhD MIT
• Professor at University of California, Berkeley

For the past thirty years, we have been developing and evaluating alternative, computer-enhanced approaches to science education. Our approaches have evolved over this period to address changing pedagogical goals, motivated by our changing visions of what is important in science education and by our growing knowledge of what young students are capa...

This paper provides an overview of our work on the nature of metacognitive knowledge, its relationship to learning through inquiry, and technologies that can be used to foster and assess its development in classrooms, as students engage in collaborative inquiry. To illustrate our theoretical ideas, we present examples from our Inquiry Island softwa...

Our objective has been to develop an instructional theory and corresponding curricular materials that make scientific inquiry accessible to a wide range of students, including younger and lower achieving students. We hypothesized that this could be achieved by recognizing the importance of metacognition and creating an instructional approach that d...

We argue that science education should focus on enabling students to develop meta-knowledge about science so that students come to understand how different aspects of the scientific enterprise work together to create and test scientific theories. Furthermore, we advocate that teaching such meta-knowledge should begin in early elementary school and...

A prototype Web-based environment, called the Web of Inquiry, was developed that built on previous work in science learning and technology. This new system was designed to meet constructivist-learning principles, support self-reflection, and meet specific interaction goals within the classroom environment. The system was tested it in fifth, sixth,...

In this paper, methods and models for the design of educational interventions and usable systems are presented and synthesized. The purpose is to suplliment the design process with educational considerations and discern design principles for the development of serious STEM games. This synthesis can contribute to the design of the next generation of...

This article examines the pedagogical practices of two science inquiry teachers and their students using a Web-based system called Web of Inquiry (WOI). There is a need to build a collective repertoire of pedagogical practices that can assist elementary and middle school teachers as they support students to develop a complex model of inquiry based...

One major goal of science education is for students to develop sophisticated explanations of the natural world (NRC, 2000). Scientists create and revise conceptual scientific models that they employ to develop and refine explanations. Scientists also have distinct forms and criteria for accepted explanations. Likewise, inquiry-based teaching enable...

The scientific enterprise is a form of collaborative learning that enables society to develop knowledge about the world – knowledge that is useful for predicting, controlling, and explaining what happens as events occur. Creating scientific communities in classrooms, by engaging young learners in theory-based empirical research, is a highly challen...

This research addresses the effectiveness of an interactive learning environment, Inquiry Island, as a general-purpose framework for the design of inquiry-based science curricula. We introduce the software as a scaffold designed to support the creation and assessment of inquiry projects, and describe its use in a middle-school genetics unit. Studen...

This report describes research done at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts institute of Technology. Support for the Laboratory's artificial intelligence research is provided in part by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense under Office of Naval Research contract N00014-75-C-0643. The goal of this...

The 13th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED-2007) is being held July 9--13, 2007, in Los Angeles, California. AIED Conferences are organized by the International AIED Society on a biennial basis. The goal of the International ...

To examine the impact of engaging students in curricula that apply a consistent approach to scientific inquiry across multiple topics and grades, we conducted longitudinal studies in two urban middle schools. In one school, the major emphasis on inquiry and reflective-assessment began in the sixth grade and continued through grades seven and eight....

This research, explores, the design of a computer environment for helping science students to learn about Newtonian dynamics. The learning environment incorporates games set in the context of a Newtonian computer microworld, where students have to control the motion of a spaceship in order to achieve goals such as hitting a target or navigating a m...

A computer support environment (SCI-WISE) for learning and doing science inquiry projects was designed. SCI-WISE incorporates software advisors that give general advice about a skill such as hypothesizing. By giving general advice (rather than step-by-step procedures), the system is intended to help students conduct experiments that are more episte...

To develop the expertise needed for lifelong learning, we argue that students need to reify, reflect on, and improve their cognitive, social, and metacognitive processes. Introducing software advisors that incorporate models of such processes has the potential to facilitate students' sociocognitive and metacognitive development. To this end, we cre...

In this study we explore the educational impact of teaching high school students several models of the same phenomenon. In particular, we create different sets of models of static electricity (each set containing 1 model of particles and 1 model of aggregates of particles) that are connected in specific ways and measure the effects of these links o...

We present,a theory,of learning in science based on students,deriving conceptual linkages among,multiple models,which represent physical phenomena,at different levels of abstraction. The mod- els vary in the primitive objects and interactions they incorporate and in the reasoning processes that are used in running them. Students derive linkages amo...

To develop lifelong learning skills, we argue that students need to learn how to learn via inquiry and understand the sociocognitive and metacognitive processes that are involved. We illustrate how software could play a central role in enabling students to develop such expertise. Our hypothesis is that sociocognitive systems, such as those needed f...

Our previous work with the ThinkerTools Inquiry Curriculum found that students who were prompted to reflect on their work performed better on inquiry projects, and attained a better understanding of the inquiry process. These prompts, however, were in a pencil-and-paper form, which did not allow for individual, on-line needs. We hypothesize that im...

Our previous research with the ThinkerTools Inquiry Curricula found that students prompted to reflect on their work performed better on inquiry projects, and attained a better understanding of the inquiry process. These prompts were in pencil-and-paper form, which did not allow for individual, on-line needs. We hypothesize that improvement will be...

Scientists, engineers, and technicians are frequently called upon to apply their expertise to new domains. We hypothesize that the knowledge needed to foster such transfer is: (a) an understanding of forms of models that are applicable in multiple domains; (b) inquiry skills for developing models and evaluating their appropriateness within a domain...

We introduce a method for promoting reflective conversations during collaborative work which enables participants to explore their cognitive goals and processes and thereby develop a metacognitive understanding of their practice. This method, termed "cognitive facilitation," seeks to provide a conceptual and linguistic basis for metacognitive refle...

Many cognitive and educational theorists believe that a prerequisite to learning physics is the attainment of the Piagetian developmental stage of formal operational thinking. According to this view, attempts to teach children about the content and form of physical theories are doomed to failure. We argue that this is not the case. Children can lea...

Our objectives in this project1 were to reconceptualize what it means to understand physics and to improve how it is taught. To achieve these objectives, we created an experimental curriculum in which students’ learning centers around interacting with computer microworlds (i.e., interactive simulations), and where the focus is as much on learning a...

We are investigating the role that computer-based models can play in helping students to learn science. In the research reported in this chapter, we conducted experimental trials of a computer environment that provides linked models that represent circuit behavior from different perspectives (such as a microscopic versus a macroscopic perspective)...

Science, particularly physics, is a difficult, and apparently inaccessible subject, to a majority of American students. According to a recent report of the Educational TestingService referred to in Science [12], “only 7% of 17-year-olds are adequately prepared for college-level science courses,” and “more than half have so little scientific underst...

AI research in qualitative modeling makes possible new approaches to teaching people about science and technology. We are exploring the implications of this work for the design of intelligent learning environments. The domain of application is electrical circuits, but the approach can be generalized to other subjects. Our prototype instructional sy...

The primary purposes of the present research are (1) to specify a principled basis for analyzing the skill and knowledge components of expert performance within a domain. (2) to develop an instructional strategy based upon this decomposition, and (3) to study the knowledge and skills resulting from such instruction. The domain of application, the S...

AI research in qualitative physics and causal models suggests new approaches to teaching people about science and engineering. We have been investigating the form that such models need to take to be effective within intelligent learning environments. The subject matter we have focused on is understanding how electrical circuits work, but the approa...

Examines ways in which intelligent tutoring systems can be used to develop models of a student's domain knowledge, problem solving abilities, and learning strategies. Cognitive skills assessment is discussed, and an example of a problem based tutoring system, Qualitative Understanding of Electrical System Troubleshooting (QUEST), is explained. (25...

focused on an alternative view of scientific explanation (modelling) and its use in instruction modelling possible evolutions in students' reasoning about electrical circuits as they come to understand more and more about circuit behavior using these model progressions as the basis for an intelligent learning environment that helps students lea...

This report discusses the importance of presenting qualitative, causally consistent models in the initial stages of learning so that students can gain an understanding of basic electrical circuit concepts and principles that builds on their preexisting ways of reasoning about physical phenomena, and it argues that tutoring environments must help st...

This research explores the design of a computer environment for helping science students to learn about Newtonian dynamics. The learning environment incorporates games set in the context of a Newtonian computer microworld, where students have to control t he motion of a spaceship in order to achieve goals such as hitting a target or navigating a ma...

A series of force and motion problems was presented to 40 high school science students. The results revealed that the majority of the students only partially understood the formalisms of Newtonian physics. Many had difficulty determining the effect that a force would have on an object's speed of motion and many neglected to take into account the cu...