Accessible Science
To make science accessible our first pragmatic pedagogical principle states: Encourage students to build on their scientific ideas as they develop more and more powerful and useful pragmatic scientific principles. To implement this pedagogical principle, instruction must engage, respect, and build on the full range of student ideas in the instructed discipline. This first principle also emphasizes synthesizing science views into a few big, coherent, accessible, and useful views. We call these pragmatic scientific principles and we make sure they apply to practical experiences. These principles are pragmatic because they summarize scientific ideas and can be used for personally relevant problems.

Our second pragmatic pedagogical principle says: Encourage students to investigate personally-relevant problems and revisit their science ideas regularly. Scientific investigation often seems disconnected from student lives because the problems students investigate do not link to personal experience.

Our third pragmatic pedagogical principle speaks to lifelong learning. It says, scaffold science activities so students participate in the inquiry process. By inquiry we refer to the full range of methods scientists use for gathering evidence and to the reasoning that links evidence to principles.

To illustrate these principles we provide evidence from the many versions of the Computer as Learning Partner curriculum that this partnership created, tested, and reformulated. See our book Computers, Teachers, Peers for more details on making science accessible.