Investigative Science Learning Environment

Helping students learn to do science

As instructors, how do we create an environment in which students can discover and learn physics for themselves - to own it, so to speak?

—Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE), a Science Process Approach that addresses this question. This approach involves students’ development of their own ideas by

• observing phenomena and looking for patterns,
• developing explanations for these patterns,
• using these explanations to make predictions about the outcomes of testing experiments,
• deciding if the outcomes of the testing experiments are consistent with the predictions,
• revising the explanations if necessary, and
• encouraging students to represent physical processes in multiple ways.

The combination of these features is applied to every conceptual unit in the ISLE learning system, thus helping them develop productive representations for qualitative reasoning and for problem solving.

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