Areas of Research     Papers     Funded Projects

eSTEP Research

The eSTEP Instructional Model

eSTEP is our acronym for the Elementary and Secondary Teacher Education Project. This project is about designing innovative, experimental web-based approaches to teaching learning sciences to pre-service teachers. Our project site describes instructional approaches that integrate:

1. Interactive study of classroom video and learning science text, supported by an online multimedia environment called a Knowledge Web (KWeb), and
2. Collaborative lesson design, supported by an online environment for Problem-based learning (pbl).

Why Do It That Way?

While there are a number of practical considerations, our work focuses largely on how to design courses in accordance with current theory about learning and transfer. The theoretical question we address is how to make the conceptual systems (e.g., learning sciences) taught in college truly useful in students’ future professional lives (e.g., teaching). The material in this site reflects several years’ thinking about this problem and about course and website designs for transfer.