ABSTRACT
Our goal in this chapter is to explore issues of instruction in the context of Jasper and discuss our initial attempts to assess the effects of instruction on learning and transfer. As noted earlier, when we first developed Jasper we hoped that it would help transform the nature of teaching and learning that took place in classrooms. Instead of a major emphasis on the transmission of knowledge from teachers to students, our vision was one of students and teachers collaboratively exploring the Jasper environments, generating questions about important issues to be explored, searching for data that were relevant to these issues, and engaging in conversations as different groups of students communicated their thinking to one another.
