ABSTRACT
The 1990s were a time of innovation in education in the United States. New visions of teaching and learning in the disciplines were being proposed in policy documents (e.g., American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 1990; California State Department of Education, 1985; National Center for History in the Schools, 1996; National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), 1991; National Research Council (NRC), 1996; National Science Foundation, 1997), and corresponding curricula and instructional methods were being developed in classrooms across the country. In addition, new theoretical frameworks were being actively explored to provide alternatives to the thenpredominant cognitive perspective, including sociocultural perspectives (Cole, 1998; Rogoff, 1990), situative perspectives (Greeno, 1989, 1991; Lave, 1988; Lave & Wenger, 1991), distributed cognition (Hutchins, 1995), and activity theory (Engeström, 1987).
