Exploring a digital tool for exchanging ideas during science inquiry

Practicing science increasingly involves knowing how to participate in a networked knowledge community. This includes expressing scientifically informed ideas, sharing ideas with peers, and evaluating multiple sources of information. Effective instruction builds on students' prior ideas, enables them to benefit from exchanging ideas with others, and supports them learning from one another. How might technology support these exchanges? And how might documenting these exchanges inform teachers' and researchers' improvements to their instruction and design? We describe the Public Idea Manager, a new curriculum-integrated tool that supports students exchanging ideas during web-based science inquiry. Our exploratory analyses show relationships between the diversity and sources of students' ideas and the quality of their explanations. We discuss implications for formative assessment, and for the role of technology in supporting students to engage more meaningfully with information and with each other.