Abstract
The Virtual Telescopes in Education (VTIE) project,
is providing tools for teaching astronomy in K-12
classrooms using remotely controlled telescopes. VTIE's
main goal to promote scientific literacy, including a
conceptual understanding of the physical world and the
scientific process itself. This paper describes an essential component of VTIE: the Scientific Investigation System for Telescopes in Education Research (SISTER).
Students are aided in the preparation of their observing
proposal by a novel Glossary Tool for dynamically
inducing hyperlinks tailored to a student's reading level,
a. Proposal Generation Interface to guide them through
the process of formulating a scientific question, and a
Paper Writing Tool to report the results of the analysis
of the data. In this paper we present the architecture and
methodology for SISTER.