Science educators have long been convinced that learners should participate in "authentic" scientific practices. We have rightly been critical of science classes where students learn facts from textbooks and worksheets. These classroom practices bear little relationship to the activities of scientists. In response, though, science educators have sometimes treated reading and writing as, at best, necessary evils, concentrating on hands-on experience as the essential core of scientific practice.
Unfortunately, this version of scientific practice is as one-sided as teaching dominated by textbooks and worksheets. If, as Niels Bohr suggested, "the task of science is expanding our experience and reducing it to order," then reading and writing are the mechanisms through which scientists accomplish this task. Scientists create, share, and negotiate the meaning of inscriptions-notes, reports, tables, graphs, drawings, diagrams. It is through this process that raw experience is transformed into data and infused with scientific meaning; it is through this process that scientists create models and theories and use them to interpret the world (cf., Bazerman, 1988; Latour and Woolgar, 1979).
The three studies in this issue all report studies that focus on the essential role of inscriptions in making experience scientifically meaningful. Carolyn Keys analyzes the reports that middle school students wrote after ecologically oriented field trips. Bowen, Roth, and McGinn compare the practices of college students and scientists as they interpret graphs. In a related article, Roth, Bowen, and McGinn compare the graphs and resources for interpretation provided by high school textbooks and scientific journals.
The picture of the role of inscriptions in the practices of science learners that emerges from these studies is disappointing, though not surprising. The learners in these studies tended to treat inscriptions as parts of school tasks rather than as tools for expanding their experience and reducing it to order. They often lacked the personal resources to create or use inscriptions more meaningfully. Textbooks often fail to provide information that would support meaningful interpretive practices by students.
These articles can help us both to understand the present state of the art in research and practice on the role of inscriptions in science learning and to consider the challenges that lie ahead. As Bowen, Roth, and McGinn suggest, our science teaching practices and materials will be more productive if we work to engage students in activities and provide them with resources to support meaningful interpretations of graphs and other inscriptions. As Keys suggests, these studies are just the beginning of a comprehensive program of research for science educators interested in written language as expression of meaning. These challenges are important; by responding to them productively we can improve science teaching and learning through research.