Jane Krauss, Curriculum Specialist

As teachers design more inquiry-based lessons that put students in the driver's seat of their own learning, they give up some control of the learning process, and sometimes privy only to the end results. Seeing Reason, an online resource offered at the Intel® Innovation in Education Web site, can help make inquiry-based projects more effective. At the core of Seeing Reason is a free interactive mapping tool that helps students construct models of their emerging understanding of complex systems. Seeing Reason has interactive features that help teachers guide student investigations and let them tap into otherwise covert thinking processes.

More Than Another Concept Mapping Tool
In general, concept mapping helps students organize factors and show relationships among them. The Seeing Reason causal mapping tool goes further, prompting students to describe how and to what degree factors relate to one another. As thinking changes over time and supporting evidence grows, students can save successive iterations of their causal map, so changes in thinking can be examined. At any point in a project (and from any networked computer), a teacher can look at a group's series of maps and write remarks for the team to consider the next time they work on their project. In response to a map, a teacher might ask students to quantify a relationship they've drawn, congratulate them on a cogent thought, or direct them to investigate a new line of inquiry.

Seeing Reason in the Classroom
Classroom examples on the Web site show how students can use the interactive tool to take on diverse questions of cause and effect, including:

• How does the world that Richard III creates contribute to his own dissatisfaction and eventual demise? (Shakespeare's Richard III)
• How does academic success affect your future? (Benefits of Math Education)
• Why is diversity increasing (or decreasing) in our neighborhood? (Neighborhood Diversity)

A detailed description of one unit includes insights from two teachers who worked together to use Seeing Reason in a project about forensic science. In Get a Clue, middle school students use the causal mapping tool to analyze evidence and testimony as they ferret out a crook. Idaho science teacher Theresa Maves says the Seeing Reason tool has made the project much easier for students to do. "I'm not sure how students would have organized this amount of information without the tool. It would have been a struggle for them to pull all the information together," she says.

Math teacher Meile Harris adds, "When using most technology tools, the technology is right in your face. However, I found that with Seeing Reason you almost forget it is there—what you are doing on the tool becomes more important than the tool you are using. You're so focused on the information you're not even realizing that you're making a causal map."

Some examples coming soon may include:

• How did we get here? (Emigration and Immigration, Past and Present), and
• Will I get diabetes? (Disease Risk Factors and Personal Health).

Whether inquiry leads to drawing a conclusion, making a choice, or settling a dispute, the processes that lead to a result are as important as the result itself.