Research Topics for Social Aspects of Digital Libraries

Joseph S. Krajcik
Associate Professor of Science Education
Center for Inquiry-Learning and Technology
School of Education and College of Engineering
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

This paper examines the affordances that digital library resources can bring to bear on fostering sustained inquiry in middle and high school science classrooms. The use of a digital library by high school and middle school science students is a central component of the University of Michigan digital library project.

The UMDL Project: Status Report

A brief status report on the University of Michigan digital library will help situate the remarks made in this paper. A group of over thirty researchers at the University of Michigan, from Information and Library Studies, Education, and Engineering are involved in an NSF/NASA/ARPA-sponsored four year effort to construct the University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL). The UMDL will be a combination digital card catalog and personal library for earth and space science resources; students and researchers will visit the UMDL with their questions and be directeded to relevant network resources.

In preparation for launching the UMDL in the spring of 1996, we have been working with middle and high school science teachers in Ann Arbor since January of 1995, to explore how on-line resources can be used to support sustained inquiry. We have developed several curriculum units that are being used in these schools including a tutorial on how to search on the WWW using volcanoes as the subject content, and units on the content areas of ozone, conservation and natural disaster. My efforts have focused primarily in developing and implementing these curriculum units that focus on sustained inquiry.

Background Information

To promote more in-depth student understanding of science, a number of researchers and policy groups (e.g., Brown and Campione, 1995; Krajcik et al., 1994; NRC, 1995) argue that students need to engage in sustained inquiry. Sustained inquiry activities include formulating authentic, meaningful questions, planning tasks, gathering resources and information, predicting outcomes, debating the value of information, evaluating information, collaborating with others, and reporting findings. To support students in these types of activities, students need a full compliment of tools designed to meet the unique needs of learners (Soloway, et al., 1994). In this paper, I first describe the affordances of a digital library that make possible sustained inquiry. Next, I describe the scaffolds that will be necessary to support sustained inquiry activities for middle and high school students.

Affordances of Digital Libraries to Support Sustained Inquiry

Central to sustained inquiry is access to resources such as information, experimental apparatus, and human experts. Moreover, central to participating in a community is the sharing of findings within the community. On-line technologies afford students opportunities to move beyond their information-poor classroom to access a variety of information resources, as well as providing a forum for publishing their findings.

To promote sustained inquiry, the digital library will need a broad range of collections.

Broad range of information: Learners need access to information to help them refine their questions and find solutions. The on-line information will bring to learners the most current information available.
Primary data sources: Learners need access to demographic data, remote sensing data etc. to support their inquiry. In many circumstances, students will use the same data and information sources as scientists.
Instruments: Access to on-line instruments such as telescopes and remote sensing devices serve as sources of direct data as learners carry-out inquiry.
Computational Instruments: Modeling, simulations and visualization tools help analyze and examine of on-line data in new ways.
Publishing tools: Learners need tools that will help them translate the information and publish their information to others. This translation is a critical step in helping learners construct and make their own understanding visible.
Collaboration tools: Inquiry will be supported if learners have access to synchronous and asynchronous communication tools that support interaction between students and scientific mentors.

Making the Affordances Useable to Learners

The vastness, wealth, and diversity of the collections possible within a digital library are critical for students engaging in sustained inquiry. In the hands of experts, the digital library collection is a tremendous resource. Unfortunately, most learners do not know how to make use of such a rich collection of resources. Middle and high school students have not acquired the metacognitive skills to use the vastness of such collections. Learners will need on-line supports that fade (scaffold) as they become more experienced in inquiry and in the search process.

A digital library interface will need to provide explicit support and fading to foster and sustain scientific inquiry. Below I outline some of the scaffolds that will be needed in digital libraries to support sustained inquiry.

Learners need support to sift through and select information that is of value to them in answering their questions. Digital libraries will bring comprehensive information to learners, expanding greatly the information that is available to students in traditional libraries. Although this wealth of information is the strength of digital libraries, learners will need support to help them organize and make decisions regarding what information is valuable to them. Without such support, novice learners will not know how to separate what is important to them and what is not.
Learners will need support in making sense of primary data. Although digital libraries will provide learners with primary data that scientists have available, many learners will not know how to interpret much of this data. The digital format of the information will help -- easy manipulation and various formats include video, graphic and sound. However, learners will need support in making sense of these primary data. One support could include the development of specially designed viewers to make sense of this data (for example, dynamic views of the ozone holes). Developing viewers that allow students to view multiple representations of the same data could potentially help a number of learners interpret the data.
Learners will need support with the inquiry process. Learners are not used to refining questions as a result of finding new information. Moreover, most learners do not have the metacognitive skills that are necessary to plan how to undergo an investigation. Support will be necessary to help learners reshape their questions based on the information that is found. Support will also be necessary to help students plan their inquiry and reflect on the information they have found. The development of on-line journals that promote students to reflect can assist in this effort.
Learners will need support in the search process. Unstructured searches result in too much information while too narrow of a search does not provide sufficient information. On-line support that guide students in appropriate search strategies are critical. Learners will need supports in tailoring and reshaping their searches for information based on information they have collected. For instance, learners don't have experience in going back and reshaping their searches based on what they have learned from previous searches. Support will be needed to help in this process.
Although the availability of on-line instruments and computational tools have the potential to support inquiry, support mechanisms for helping students use these tools will be necessary. Developing modeling tools that express relationships using natural language instead of mathematical expressions can be a very valuable support for learners when they first begin to model.
Learners will need support in determining the validity of information. Digital libraries will bring a vastness of information to students. Different groups will place different slants on the interpretation of data. Students will need help in evaluating these different interpretations.
Learners will need navigation support. As in a hypercard environment, learners might easily become lost in a digital library. The development of navigation tools that can help learners keep track of where they have gone and the information they have collected is essential in helping learners transverse the digital library.

Concluding Comments:

The digital library will not by itself serve to support sustained inquiry in a classroom. The curriculum, the tasks set by the teacher, and the role of the teacher have a major impact on determining if students will engage in sustained inquiry. However, the affordances made available in digital libraries and the scaffolds provided in digital libraries that will help make the resources useable to learners will play a substantial role in making sustained inquiry accessible to learners.

References:

Brown, A., and Campione, J. (1994), Guided discovery in a community of learners. McGilly, K. (Ed.), Classroom Lessons: Integrating cognitive theory and classroom practice, (pp 229-270). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

Krajcik, J., Blumenfeld, P., Marx, R., and Soloway, E. (1994), A collaborative model for helping middle grade science teachers learn project-based instruction. The Elementary School Journal, 94(5), 483-497.

National Research Council (1996). National Science Education Standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Soloway, E., Guzdial, M., & Hay, K. E. (1994) Learner-Centered Design: The challenge for HCI in the 21st century, Interactions, Vol. 1, No. 2, April, 36-48

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