The intro that Robert provided here did a good job of describing the basic background of the PRISMS project and providing information about the PRISMS Web seminar. As an introduction, I should probably say a bit more about the project and its origins. The PRISMS project began as an outgrowth of a curriculum review process undertaken by the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Project 2061. Phenomena and representations in textbooks were only a part of these analyses.

Today, as more and more resources become available online, the idea of a measured review of these resources for teachers is more valuable all the time. Because many online resources gain great pedagogical value through the phenomena and representations they include, the PRISMS project has taken this textbook review process and applied it to online phenomena and representations. The PRISMS process reviews resources from two angles, by describing their alignment to learning goals taken from national standards documents and by outlining their instructional effectiveness. Reviews detail how these resources meet specific criteria and provide teacher notes to assist teachers who use the resources in ensuring that they use resources that are well aligned to their intended science content and are effective for bringing that content across to students.

I’ll have more to say about this in upcoming posts, as well as to tackle some questions raised during the seminar about research into student learning/misconceptions and research about multimedia representations themselves. For now, I encourage you to poke around the PRISMS collection and look at a few resource reviews. And I’d also like to hear about your experiences with phenomena and representations in the classroom, to kick things off. What examples do you have, either from textbooks or digital resources, of phenomena or representations that were especially effective? How about ones that were distinctly unhelpful for students’ learning? Add ‘em in the comments…

School is out, but what better time to review your lesson plans? Are there concepts that your students don’t understand despite your best efforts?

The American Institute of Physics created a list of common misconceptions that children (and even adults) have about scientific phenomena. Here’s a few of them: “The solar system is very crowded”, “The pupil of the eye is a black object or spot on the surface of the eye.”, “Gases do not have mass.” or “Heat is a substance.”

In How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, edited by John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, one method of dispelling these strongly held misconceptions is by “bridging students’ correct beliefs (called anchoring conceptions) to their misconceptions through a series of intermediate analogous situations.”

Simulations, interactives and multimedia resources found online provide a dynamic method for bridging student knowledge by helping to build constructs of understanding. Choosing the right resource involves examining the nature of these representations and real-world phenomena and whether they enhance or hinder the learning process.

Enter Phenomena and Representations for the Instruction of Science in Middle Schools or PRISMS Project of the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance (MMSA) designed to make searching for conceptual representations and real phenomena easier and more accessible. This website will be featured on the June 19^th NSDL/NSTA Web Seminar. Registration for this seminar is free.

PRISMS, developed with the help of middle school science teachers, provides feedback on resources with annotations related to the learning concepts addressed, strengths of the resource, and ways to augment the resource for more effective teaching and learning. These annotations address key questions that aid and instruct teachers on how to select resources with grade level appropriate vocabulary, ones that allow for the inclusion or exclusion of additional text to gradually build comprehension, as well as define if the resource truly addresses the intended learning goals in mind.