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…