Chapter 3: Framing the Research on Technology and Student Learning in Science Education

A central component of the National Science Education Standards (National Research Council [NRC], 1996) is “inquiry into authentic questions generated from student experiences” (p. 31), and digital technologies have become increasingly important tools for facilitating students’ scientific inquiry.

A wide range of digital technologies are currently used in school science classrooms, including probeware, simulations (including animations), digital images and video (along with digital cameras, microscopes, etc., for capturing images), spreadsheets, graphing calculators, global positioning systems, geographic information systems, and the Web. These tools are used for a wide range of purposes, from gathering scientific information to collecting data for analysis to creating and exploring models of scientific phenomena to communicating findings (Park & Slykhuis, 2006).