WISE Inquiry

I completed the Frog Deformity WISE inquiry, found here: http://wise.berkeley.edu/student/topFrame.php?projectID=4742

I was intrigued from the start: I liked the way the students (6-12) were presented with two hypotheses, so at least they were pointed in the right direction without too much openness to the exercise, but at same time they were asked to do some thinking themselves. Great stuff! It got me thinking about other applications of this way of doing things.

The inquiries kind of feel like webquests; like a webquest, it keeps the student focused on the task at hand…it directs him/her, instead of being a general web search.

Navigation here was a bit strange or hard to use: e.g., it was generally hard to get back to the page you had been on.

It’s nice that you could type your notes right into the Web page. That way your notes and inquiry do not get separated from what you are doing on the Web. Also, I like the way it collects all your notes together at the end!

I think the word “mutant” was spelled wrong.

There were some dead links in this exercise (a link off the page where pictures of the deformed frogs were shown and the page about other scientists' reactions).

In general, I liked the way that this inquiry guided the student into recognition of the interlocking aspect of nature—things going on at the amphibian level and even bacterial level can ultimately affect humans. Also, the exercise was authentic—this is a real issue that real scientists think about today. Finally, the exercise drew together several kinds of media—newspaper articles, pictures, articles by scientists, that made it more interesting to work on and complete.