This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to create a series of interactive curriculum and assessment materials for middle and high school science. These materials will be in the form of computer-based activities that use scaffolded, manipulable models to encourage scientific reasoning. In addition to capturing their answers to specific questions, the activities will monitor students' actions as they engage in exploratory and problem-solving tasks. This rich source of information will be automatically transferred where it will be analyzed and made available to teachers for embedded assessment of students' content knowledge and reasoning skills. The technology produced by this project will enable researchers and educators to create and customize novel education activities that guide and monitor students' actions as they solve increasingly difficult problems using computer models of scientific phenomena. The technology enables extremely fine-grained performance data to be collected from very large numbers of subjects. This combination will create unprecedented opportunities for conducting scientific research in education. Research with computer-based, interactive curriculum materials demonstrates that they impose no extraordinary requirements for teacher professional development, and are disproportionately effective with precisely those students whom traditional science teaching often leaves behind. By bringing up-to-date research results to the classroom in the form of easily accessible reports on student achievement, the project will accelerate a shift away from the current post hoc, multiple-choice testing modality, in favor of real-time embedded assessment of critical aspects of science learning that are difficult to measure by conventional techniques. The project will give teachers a tool that will help them reach underachieving students, coupled with a powerful assessment
