EAGER: SAVI: Dynamic Digital Text: An Innovation in STEM Education

Sadhana Puntambekar and colleagues develop techniques for visualizing and presenting STEM content digitally to engage students and engender deep learning. They apply the results of their research toward the development of new presentation, interaction, and navigation techniques for digital STEM content, and then evaluate these digital artifacts in the context of an inquiry-based pedagogy designed around dynamic digital text.

In the long term, the researchers envision a cloud-based service architecture that allows anytime, anywhere, and as-needed access to dynamic digital content covering an extensive set of topics for school and college level STEM education that is integrated with a proven pedagogy that makes effective use of digital STEM content.

Collaboration with researchers in Finland is a key component of this work, as the team is testing its theoretical framework for dynamic digital texts with content in science and computing, for middle school and college, in Finnish and English.

As such, this project is a first attempt to systematically evaluate the use and utility -- across multiple content domains, learner levels, and cultures -- of dynamic digital texts founded on concept map-based organizations of domain knowledge.