January 5, 2000

Joe Exline began the teleconference with a Welcome and roll call. Sue Darnell  facilitated the teleconference and explained Agenda and discussion protocols

Decisions from Teleconference:

1. We recommend that the next working group design 3 rubrics (k-4, 5-8, 9-12)
2. And that the 3 rubrics work on off of and are built from one operational definition of Science as Inquiry
3. To write/compose more work on the operational definition

Discussion:
Discussions surrounding the draft rubrics by Shelley Lee and Sue Ellis ensued. Sue's rubric simply took the SIWG operational definition current categories (Content, Abilities of SI, Understandings of SI, Values and attitudes of SI, Skills, Conceptual Themes, and essential Pieces) and placed them in a rubric format.

Shelley Lee began to analyze Sue's conglomerate and designed rubrics for the student learner (elements here were given by Harold Pratt in Telecon #1), the teacher facilitator, and the environment. Shelley also included rubrics for the Understandings of SI, Understandings of Content, and Habits of Mind.

Redundancy becomes apparent in our list when analyzing Sue's rubric from our group work. We might want to collapse the student, teacher and environment rubrics into one rubric or address the teacher and environment components in later phases of NLIST.

We need to be aware of the grain-size equivalency of the individual criteria of the rubric. Regarding the content issue: The question arose, should content be an element of inquiry or is inquiry an element of content in NSES? If the later is true then placing content as a subservient component of inquiry may not be appropriate.

The group mentioned that is was important to capture and clarify the relationship between inquiry and content. Tom Gadsen suggested that in the rubric we may want to use verbiage like: Inquiry connects explanations to accurate scientific knowledge (paraphrased).

Instructional objectives (what the teacher does) and performance objectives (what the student does) were clarified by Rowena Douglas. The question also arose: What grade level(s) are we aiming for in our rubric: k-12 as one group or separate levels? The group consensus (as depicted in the teleconference decisions) was to develop three individual rubrics for the k-4, 5-8 and 9-12 levels.

There were several rubric design suggestions:
1. We could have a rubric for the website and then another for the outcome of the website
2. We could have the content basis identified then a rubric profile of student inquiry

Final conclusions were to pair off in teams and have all members individually write an operational definition of "Science as Inquiry" and then have the teams assimilate these individual responses. Individuals will submit their unique operational definitions by January 11,2000 with the groups generating a combined definition by January 16, 2000. Joe Exline provided the final comments and planning steps for the next Telecom on January 19, 2000 from 12:00 to 2:00 pm EST.