Implementation and evaluation of the GenScope learning environment: Issues, solutions, and results

Abstract: This special session describes a collaborative effort to implement and evaluate the GenScope software and associated curriculum in a broad range of secondary life science classrooms. This effort illustrates how technology-based environments can be used to meet existing content-area educational goals and highlights new approaches to conducting large-scale evaluations of such environments. The four presentations in this special session include (1) project overview and software design, (2) implementation design, (3) assessment design, and (4) learning outcomes. With the notable exception of four at-risk urban classrooms, students in the GenScope classrooms have demonstrated the same disappointingly modest reasoning gains as students using conventional genetics curriculum. Encouragingly, a forthcoming revision of the software will make it possible to build in the curricular features that contributed to the dramatically larger reasoning gains witnessed in the four at-risk classrooms that used GenScope. 1. Project Overview and Software Design (Horwitz) GenScope is an open-ended exploratory software tool that students can use to investigate a variety of phenomena in genetics. The program is explicitly designed to encourage and support multi-level reasoning