C. Madeira’s scientific contributions

This study reports on the continued development of Common Knowledge (CK) - a pedagogical and technological innovation that supports knowledge building blended discourse. Students use handheld tablets to contribute notes to a community knowledge base, which is publicly displayed on the classroom's interactive whiteboard (IWB). This aggregate display provides students with a powerful visualization of the community's idea flow. The IWB display further provides teachers with "at-a-glance" formative assessment of students' thinking and supports spontaneous adjustments to their orchestration of inquiry activities and blended discourse. This paper presents a study of how CK supports student and teacher discourse in inquiry science.

This paper presents a longitudinal study of teacher professional development that supports teachers through two interventions, namely scaffolded reflection and peer-exchange, and enables teachers to strengthen their learning of complex Web 2.0 practices within a community of learners. Teachers develop such knowledge only through authentic classroom practices. Nine secondary science teachers (N=9) designed, enacted and revised a technology-enhanced inquiry-based lesson. Teachers' ideas, lesson plans and reflections were recorded, and their classroom enactments were captured on video in order to connect to their shifts in practice.

The work presented here is a product of a collaborative effort to develop a knowledge community and inquiry curriculum for elementary science, where students engage in extended investigations of simulated scientific phenomena presumed to occupy the physical space of their classrooms. By their immersive nature, these "embedded phenomena" lend themselves to a collective epistemology, and hence to new forms of learning and instruction that depart from the conventional didactic approach. The symposium centers on the design and enactment of a seven-week elementary school ecosystems unit, WallCology, developed in close collaboration with partner teachers and school administrators during summer and fall of 2011. Six posters highlight different facets of our effort, including descriptions of the immersive environment, the instructional narrative, the inquiry support technologies, the role of aggregate representations, discourse processes, and the classroom experiences of the 37 students and two teachers who participated in the unit.

Prior knowledge is one of the most important factors for learning. During the iterative cycles of inquiry learning, learners' prior domain knowledge is modified, refined, and further developed, provided that learners act upon self-assessments of their understanding and that they can actually think of appropriate hypotheses. Furthermore, knowledge about inquiry strategies influences the quality of the learners' inquiry activities, and the lack there of requires compensatory support. This symposium brings together recent work about the role of prior knowledge for inquiry learning and ways to compensate for the lack of it. The four papers focus on the role of learners' self-assessment of their current understanding for their subsequent inquiry activities, on the gradual refinement of their knowledge on the basis of reflection, and on prior presentation of theoretical background information and concurrent presentation of inquiry strategies as ways to compensate for lack of prior theoretical knowledge and strategy knowledge, respectively.