Only a limited amount of material is available. More material than the current twenty hours would be needed to do a complete job of learning to reason like a scientist. Twenty hours reflects budget restrictions, rather than desirability.
We are concerned little is available in this Series for young children. Current material is useful for students of ten or above. Young children have natural scientific curiosity that needs to be nurtured for later interest in science. So it is a major defect of the Series that we do not start with young children, and continue up to the middle school and secondary school material that is the major emphasis now. For material for the very young, and perhaps for other students, we would make extensive use of voice. The rapidly advancing CD--ROM technology makes this increasingly practical.
The ten units in the Scientific Reasoning Series demonstrate the potentialities of a highly interactive medium for making the learning process more active, more individualized, and more exciting. The existing materials show that students can learn topics very difficult to approach in existing courses. The Series makes it likely that we could bring this material to all, or almost all, students, rather than simply to an elite minority.
Given that far more material is needed, we can raise two interesting questions. First, can we make this material into a ``course,'' or a series of courses. The word ``course'' is not entirely appropriate. We see learning of science in the future as a continuous activity.
Second, there is a question of full scale summative evaluation. Funds for this have not been available in our current projects, and indeed one would probably need far more material than we have for a full summative evaluation. Summative evaluation presents problems, because there is little competitive conventional learning material to use as the comparison basis. But it could be done, given sufficient funding. We seldom conduct adequate summative evaluations in education, because of the expenses involved. So most of our curriculum material at all levels of education has not been well-tested.