Internet Tools for Scientific Inquiry

"We have found the type of Internet resources reviewed in this paper to be useful for facilitating the delivery of the type of inquiry-based instruction envisioned in the National Science Education Standards. "

Students as Scientists Project

We have found the type of Internet resources reviewed in this paper to be useful for facilitating the delivery of the type of inquiry-based instruction envisioned in the National Science Education Standards. The resources provide access to outstanding databases that are relevant to studies of water quality along with engaging and useful tools for exploring that data. Students using these Internet resources become engaged in inquiries that promote their development of scientific-, computer-, and graphic-literacy. Additionally, the value of these tools can be enhanced by integrating their use in the classroom with other compatible Internet-based educational resources. For example one of the resources discussed in this paper, the "River Run Data Visualization Tool," can be readily and seamlessly integrated with another Internet-based educational program, the "Students as Scientists Project"
(http://smec.uncwil.edu/GLAXO/SAS/index.htm - best viewed using Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher). When used in concert, these two programs provide students with experience in a wide range of scientific activities including obtaining water samples, analyzing those samples, publishing and processing their data using the Internet and Excel, and generating and interpreting literally hundreds of graphs displaying comparable data to their own (though more valid and reliable than data drawn from student analyses alone).

River Run Resource http://www.uncwil.edu/riverrun/

Figure 1. Lake stratification from Water on the Web.

The WOW web site offers several additional powerful utilities that could be useful in an inquiry-driven middle school science classroom. The site also provides teacher- and student-oriented lesson plans to facilitate teachers in effectively implementing these resources.

The River Run Resource (http://www.uncwil.edu/riverrun/) offers two main interactive data displays, the ARCVIEW Internet Map Server (IMS) and the Data Visualization Tool (DVT). The IMS in River Run is used for displaying and querying maps of the Lower Cape Fear River drainage basin. The maps are interactive, permitting the user to zoom in and out of the maps with different amounts of detail being presented at different spatial scales. This tool gives the user the power to link databases and maps to create dynamic displays. Global Information Service tools such as the IMS have been demonstrated as effective support structures to facilitate students in conducting original research and spatial analysis (Alibrandi, 1998).

Figure 2 Example of an IMS from the Riverrun Website.

The Data Visualization Tool is similar to the color mapper for lake data described above, with the exception that the X-axis of the displayed graphs is analogous to the Y-axis in the lake data. That is, in the lake graphs the vertical dimension is used to map lake depth whereas in the river graphs the horizontal axis of the graph maps the flow of the river (from upstream on the left to downstream on the right).