NSF Grant Supports SCOPE Project to Make Science Learning Come Alive The National Science Foundation has awarded $1.84 million dollars to a GSE-based project that seeks to teach science by involving students in controversies that researchers are actively debating. Professor Marcia Linn directs this innovative project, named Science Controversies On-line: Partnerships in Education (SCOPE). One wing of the project, the SCOPE Research Forum, will provide leading scientists worldwide with an Internet network to share information and theories about hotly disputed topics in science. Another part of the project will involve school children in four countries in the SCOPE Controversy Forum. In this related online network, students will have a chance to interact with the scientists working on these controversial scientific topics and to approach science more in the way that researchers do. The disputes they will discuss include predicting earthquakes, analyzing evidence for life on Mars, understanding global warming, explaining the disappearance of amphibians, controlling malaria, and designing storage containers for nuclear waste. "Scientists proceed along the lines of controversy," Professor Linn explained, "but school science tends toward the presentation of known facts. This sometimes leads students to develop incorrect ideas about the nature of science content and scientific process." The SCOPE Project hopes to investigate how interactive learning communities can learn from a different model of science education. SCOPE is aptly named, since it will take in young people and scientists from a wide arc of the globe. The online community of students will come from such widespread areas as San Francisco; San Antonio, Texas; London, England; Brisbane, Australia; and Israel. The scientists who will interact with them include Floyd Bloom of UC San Diego, editor of Science magazine; Sheila Jasanoff, who studies the history and philosophy of science at Harvard; Ed Lazowska, who researches computer science at the University of Washington; malaria expert Carole Long from the Allegheny College of Medicine; physicist BatSheva Eylon, from the Weizmann Institute in Israel; and Richard White of the physics department of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. The SCOPE project will make use of the latest in educational technology, both using tools already available, and pioneering and testing others. The aim is both to improve controversy research, and to make new evidence and issues visible to scientists and students alike.

Marcia Linn