Toward supporting learners participating in scientifically-informed community discourse

recognizes both its diversity and unity; and uses scientific knowledge and ways of thinking for individual and social purposes.” ([2], p. ix) In traditional high school classrooms, learning science means reading textbooks, listening to lectures, and conducting a few disconnected, out-of-context laboratory experiments. If one of the goals of science education is to produce citizens who can respond and act capably around science-based issues in their communities, we must support a new perspective on the way science is taught, and to some degree, the things that are taught in science classes. To support this new perspective, we provide the rationale and framework for a collaborative computer-based modeling, discourse, and decision making system currently under development, called RiverMUD.1 RiverMUD is a multi-user domain in which students conduct scientific inquiries within a virtual community. Traditional classrooms based entirely on a didactic teaching approach typically have difficulty accomplishing the goal of producing scientificallyinformed, knowledge-using citizens called for by the reform documents. However, a newer perspective based on constructivist and sociocultural theories presents an alternative to the didactic approach. These theoretical frameworks provide the principles and evidence for establishing collaborative, contextualized, knowledge-building and knowledge-using environments for learning. They lead us toward the definition of pedagogies, like project-based science, and to the design of computational tools like RiverMUD that support the creation of communities around the production and use of scientific knowledge.