1. Project Summary

This four-year ITEST program will provide high school and middle school students of ethnic/racial minority status in the Boston Public Schools with IT enrichment experiences in the sciences. The project will: 1) engage the high school students in high-level, intellectually rigorous scientific research about astronomy and students' understanding thereof alongside university-level researchers; 2) produce multimedia data documents about student learning using cutting edge information technologies.

Work will take place over a two-year cycle which will be repeated once. Each cohort of the high-school students will serve on research teams as apprentices to graduate and undergraduate science/engineering students from Tufts University, in a collaborative effort to study the thinking of middle school students around selected, standards-based concepts in astronomy. Based upon the project's shared analysis of research conducted in year 1, the teams will proceed in year 2 to propose, construct, implement, and assess computer-aided scientific modeling for the purpose of improving middle school student understanding of science concepts. At appropriate intervals, the project will publish to its website the study's peer-reviewed data and step-by-step analysis.

During the research study the high school students will learn to articulate their own understanding of the science through pilot interviews of each other around existing computer modeling technologies currently in use at Tufts. They will then proceed to learn how to investigate the scientific conceptions of middle school students, furthering deepening their own knowledge of the science as they develop and assess new instructional adaptations. They will learn how to shoot, edit, and analyze digital video, how to publish these multimedia analyses to the Internet, how to use the Internet for project-based communication, and how to interpret as well as design computer-based models.  While acting as apprentices to the Tufts students, the high school students will simultaneously serve as mentors to middle school students, offering positive role models of exciting participation in scientific inquiry. The project's self-directed and exploratory learning opportunity will capture and sustain the intellectual imagination of high school students who will find in their participation an opportunity to think and act like scientists.

1.1 Intellectual Merit

This project offers collaborative research as an innovative model for teaching scientific inquiry and technological applications. Through their cognitive apprenticeships (Lave & Wenger, 1991) to the graduate research teams, the high school students will participate in constructing and executing a scientific research agenda. In order to do this, they will have to first identify and then fundamentally re-evaluate their own perspective on their understanding of science.   The project will systematically track changes in the apprentices' knowledge of the science and of their cohorts' understanding of science throughout the project.

1.2 Broader Impacts

Apprenticeships like these teach students the habits of mind that scientists use when they reconcile the relationship of the empirical to the theoretical. Public demonstrations - through the Internet and face-to-face presentations - of the success of this project will demonstrate the validity of this model to a wider community of teachers, parents, scientists, and science educators.    This project is a proof of concept regarding the feasibility of special sorts of apprenticeships between high school students and others at various points along their scientific careers.