This study explores how web-based scaffolding tools provide instructional support while implementing a socio-scientific inquiry (SSI) unit in a science classroom. This case study focused on how students used web-based scaffolding tools during SSI activities, and how students perceived the SSI unit and the scaffolding tools embedded in the SSI activities. A web-based SSI unit was developed and u...

It has long been a goal of science education in the United States that students leave school with a robust understanding of the nature of science. Decades of research show that this does not happen. Inquiry-based instruction is advocated as a means for developing such understanding, although there is scant direct evidence that it does. There is a gap between what is known about students’ inquir...

In her reflections on the narrative research approach, the author starts by placing narrative research within the framework of sociocultural theory, where the challenge for the researcher is to examine and understand how human actions are related to the social context in which they occur and how and where they occur through growth. The author argues that the narrative as a unit of analysis prov...

Merleau-Ponty begins the Phenomenology of Perception by explaining that phenomenology aims to uncover our primitive contact with the world (vi), and so may give us an account of space as it is lived. While appreciative of scientific explorations of the world and space, Merleau-Ponty asserts that all knowledge garnered from scientific inquiry is originally “gained through [one’s] own particular ...

Autonomous agents in real-time strategy (RTS) games lack an integrated framework for reasoning about choke points and regions of open space in their environment. This paper presents an algorithm which partitions the environment into a set of polygonal regions and computes optimal choke points between adjacent regions. This representation can be used as a component for AI agents to reason about ...

Historically, the evolution of expert systems has been driven by scientifically based fields such as medicine, geology, and computer engineering. More recently, expert system developers have turned their attention to the highly judgmental decision tasks found in business and finance We introduce the corporate assessment problem, point out the limitations of current expert system approaches to t...

The most widely understood goal of artificial intelligence is to understand and build autonomous, intelligent, thinking machines. A perhaps larger opportunity and complementary goal is to understand and build an interactive knowledge medium. 34 THE AI MAGAZINE AI Magazine Volume 7 Number 1 (1986) (© AAAI)