Innovations in Science Instruction Through Modeling (ISIM)

Innovations in Science Instruction though Modeling (ISIM) is the teacher professional development component of the Inquiry into Practice research program funded through a National Science Foundation Teacher Professional Continuum grant (Award # 0554652). Coordinated by the Sacramento Area Science Project (a California Science Project site based jointly at the University of California, Davis, and California State University, Sacramento), the ISIM program was designed to provide two consecutive cohorts of middle and high school science teachers with two years of professional development centered in model-based reasoning.

The ISIM teachers collaborated with educational researchers in knowledge construction throughout the Inquiry into Practice design research project. As described in the original proposal, "the main goal of the Inquiry into Practice project is to understand how teachers first adopt and then promote pedagogical practices that engage students in model-based reasoning." Model-based reasoning is the process of reasoning with a set of ideas, specifically, with a scientific model.