ABSTRACT
Through the design, enactment and study of educational innovations we can advance our understanding of individual and social mechanisms associated with learning and development (diSessa, 1991; Mendelson, 1996). As designers of instruction, curriculum, and technology, we need to find productive mechanisms for making our theoretical influences and commitments as well as the hypotheses embedded in our designs clear to each other. Our theoretical approaches and influences should be foregrounded and refined as they inform our design efforts. The overall goal of the research presented in this chapter is to inform the development of a knowledge base of pragmatic design principles that can shape educational innovations that make use of educational technology and orchestrate the use of the innovations in science classrooms with the goal of promoting knowledge integration (Linn, 1995; Linn, Bell, & Hsi, 1998). With our innovations, we seek to help students develop a principled understanding of scientific topics, make appropriate connections between these scientific ideas, and apply this integrated knowledge to real-world and classroom experiences. Knowledge integration, which can be taken as a particular view of conceptual change, is an individual learning outcome focused on domain-specific conceptual understanding although it is often powerfully influenced by social learning mecha-nisms. This chapter explores how to orchestrate collaborations around abstract argument representations in the classroom to promote individual learning.
