ABSTRACT:This study documents an instructional methodology to teach a fundamental reasoning skill during scientific inquiry: the evaluation of empirical evidence against multiple hypotheses. Using the "design experiment" approach, with iterative cycles we developed an instructional framework that lends itself to authentic scientific inquiry by providing a nontraditional approach to three aspects of learning: the activities students are engaged in during scientific inquiry, the tools students use while constructing knowledge, and the assessment of learning outcomes. The present article focuses on the contribution of two components of this instructional framework: the effect of technology-based knowledge-representation tools and the effect of reflective assessment on learning to act and think scientifically. The technological tools of the framework allowed students to represent their developing knowledge of natural phenomena with either graphical mapping or with word-processed prose. The reflective assessment we used was a form of inquiry rubrics that provided clear expectations for optimal progress throughout the entire process of inquiry by indicating specific assessment criteria for the various components of scientific inquiry. The results indicated that in real-life-like classroom investigations designed to teach students how to evaluate data in relation to theories, the use of evidence mapping is superior to prose writing. Furthermore, this superior effect of evidence mapping was greatly enhanced by the use of reflective assessment throughout the inquiry process. Modes of representational guidance explain both the superior effect of evidence mapping as well as the discrepancy between the effects of explicit reflection on evidence mapping compared to prose writing. These results have fundamental implications for the development of cognitively-based classroom learning environments and for the design of further research on learning.

Abstract. To be successful, CSCL technology must be adopted by teachers and incorporated into the activities of the classroom. This paper describes a comprehensive approach to supporting teachers learning to implement computer-supported collaborative inquiry in their classrooms. The approach comprises (1) a networked software system, "Belvedere," that provides students with shared workspaces for coordinating and recording their collaboration in scientific inquiry; (2) activity plans worked out collaboratively with teachers; (3) "challenge problems" and Web-based materials designed to match and enrich the curriculum, and (4) selfand peer-assessment instruments given to students to guide the process of scientific inquiry. A fundamental aim of this work is to restructure the classroom and shift the initiative for learning activity to the students.

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This article describes the first cycle of a multiyear research project aimed at establishing a common ground between educationally relevant psychological research and educational practice. We translated a theoretically motivated, carefully crafted, and laboratory-based instructional procedure of proven effectiveness into a classroom intervention, making minimal modifications to the instructional components and adapting to the constraints of an elementary school science classroom. Our intervention produced significant gains in fourth-grade students' ability to create controlled experiments, provide valid justifications for their experiments, and evaluate experiments designed by others. It also raised several new questions about how students understand sources of error during experimentation and how that understanding is related to their level of certainty about conclusions that are supported by the experimental outcomes. We view this report as part of a continuing research cycle that includes 3 phases: (a) use-inspired, basic research in the laboratory; (b) classroom verification of the laboratory findings; and (c) follow-up applied (classroom) and basic (laboratory) research.Two beliefs widely shared by readers of this journal are that (a) basic research in cognitive and developmental psychology can contribute to instructional practice, and