The following article appeared in the September/October 1998 issue of the ASTC Newsletter. (At the time, I was Director of Learning Technologies at the Science Museum of Minnesota.)

I seldom find myself taking on the job of responding to the science questions we receive through our museum web site. However, when I received the following e-mail regarding the fauna of Madagascar last February, I became interested and began to search for the requested information:

I am doing a project for school, and chameleons are (not sure which species) endangered. I was wondering what their outlook on life is (i.e. is their population decreasing or increasing), what are things that are being done or can be done to help them, and what is causing them to be endangered.

First, I found a well-designed web site on chameleon conservation and shared this question. I also sent an e-mail to a professor from a university in Texas who had published a couple of papers on chameleons. Finally I wrote back to the student, relating my process, asking the student's grade level, and expressing interest in any information the student found.

Over the next 24 hours, I received numerous messages from the Chameleon Conservation Society listserv, mostly focusing on the debate over whether to feed chameleons live crickets. No one on the list responded to the question I had forwarded about endangered chameleons. And I never heard back from the professor. However, I did receive the following reply from the student inquirer:

I'm only in 9th grade. :-( Thanks a lot for your help, though! It came in just in time. THANK YOU SO MUCH. I'm not doing too good in science, and I needed the grade. Thanks!

Despite the appreciation expressed, I felt disappointed by the exchange. I had no illusions that I had helped inspire this young person's interest in science. I started wondering what I might have done differently.

Several weeks later, in a humanities seminar at the museum, seminar leader Tom Simpson made a comment that stayed with me: "An answer to a question is a bullet that kills the conversation." (See remarks by Tom Simpson, below.)

His comment prompted me to look back at Eleanor Duckworth's book, The Having of Wonderful Ideas. In a chapter entitled, "The Virtues of Not Knowing," Duckworth suggests that getting the right answer is in fact a passive transaction. She discusses why she avoids offering explanations when her students ask questions:

Instead of explaining to the students, then, I ask them to explain what they think and why. I find the following results. First, in trying to make their thoughts clear for other people, students achieve greater clarity for themselves. Much of the learning is in the explaining. (Why should the teacher monopolize occasions for trying to make herself clear?)

She goes on to offer several other compelling reasons why she concentrates on getting students to develop and share their own explanations for subjects ranging from the moon to teaching.


In 1994, as part of the Science Museum of Minnesota's Science Learning Network team, I began working with Mike Petrich and Karen Wilkinson to develop web resources with the goal of inspiring young people, teachers, and their families to make personal connections to science. We spent hours over the course of years discussing, developing, defending, and revising our approach as we created Thinking Fountain, Windmills and Whirligigs, Inventions, and other unconventional sites.

Our process for developing the content of our web sites could be called the "stone soup" approach. We began with experiences, observations, and conversations that inspired our inquiry. We then invited others to add their own ideas, which nourished further ideas and investigations. Ultimately, we designed the resources to have an open-ended, unfinished, playful sketchbook look.

When we first began to publicize the site, a message would arrive every several days: a suggested link from a graduate student; drawings from inspired third graders; and many science questions. Because we avoided information delivery, we hadn't anticipated that half our e-mail (now about 10 messages per week) would be requests for science information from parents and students as far away as New Zealand.

As lead creators of the web resources, Karen and Mike always responded to the majority of incoming e-mail. When they decided to attend graduate school last year, we agreed that, in their available time, both would continue to serve as e-mail correspondents. Nevertheless, my personal experience with the ninth grader's science question—coupled with Tom Simpson's suggestion that a person asking for information might actually be hoping for something more than an answer—has led me to take a closer look at how Mike and Karen have responded to the science questions we have received over the past year.

Each of their responses is personalized and varies, of course, depending on the subject and question. Yet, looking closely, I began to notice a pattern—five recurring elements occurring in different combinations. Identifying these elements has furthered my understanding of how questions might turn into conversations.

Here are the five elements I noticed, with examples from Karen's e-mail:

1. Share interest. Karen and Mike begin many of their replies by expressing genuine curiosity about the topic. They offer a brief personal anecdote, observation, or expression of wonder in response to an inquiry such as:

   "I have been researching bread molds on the Internet and came upon one of your sites. I was looking for information. If you could provide me with any, that would be greatly appreciated."

   Karen turned this fairly generic request for information into an opportunity to share an affinity for the subject, as well as to encourage direct experience with the phenomena, by responding:

   "I'm glad to hear you're interested in mold. I do hope that you're growing your own mold (and not just researching it on the Internet). I must admit that I really enjoy growing mold, even when it happens by accident in the back of my refrigerator. I found the most incredible mold on a tomato last weekend!"

2. Ask about context. Karen and Mike ask about the circumstances in which the person sending the e-mail had their question. For example, they received this message:

   "Hi I have a question for you. How many days does it take a caterpillar to become a butterfly? I am 8 years old. Please answer. Thank you for letting us e-mail you. Brittany."

   Rather than heading straight for the answer, Karen expressed interest and asked about Brittany's investigations of butterflies:
   "Are you learning about butterflies? I work for a science museum and have been learning about butterflies over the past year."

3. Pass along information.
   
   A young person named Yola wrote: "Hi I just wanted to know how the Monarch Butterfly knows when rain's gonna come because before rain falls they find a place to hide! Please tell me thanx!"
   
   In this case, Karen did not find out the answer, but she did find some related material that she passed along: "I have found some information related to monarchs in the rain that you might be interested in..."
   
   Most of Karen and Mike's e-mail messages do include the information or explanation requested, if available, with the following qualifications:

   - The explanation or facts are just a piece of the response.
   - The information is often in the middle of the message.
   - The information is an incidental piece of the conversation, rather than the focus.
   - The tone of the answer is of information shared among colleagues, not of handing down knowledge from an expert to a novice.
   - The information is attributed to a person, rather than pretending to be the generic science voice. - The explanation is brief.
   
   A Board member at our museum, a university professor, told me a related story. He said that when his son asks him a question and he gets ready to respond, his son will often add, "I don't need the whole answer, Dad."

4. Recommend resources. Karen and Mike tend to recommend only a couple of carefully selected resources, with specifics as to what in particular they thought the inquirer might find interesting. As in our web resources, they recommend resources offline as well as online: places to visit, people to contact, books, hands-on materials and where you might get them. For instance:
   "I found a couple of web sites that might be useful. This one has images of bread mold taken with a scanning electron microscope. I think you'll be surprised at how strange the mold looks when it is magnified...Oh! -- one more thing. There is a children's book called Lots of Rot written by Vicki Cobb. I like the book because of the descriptions and the variety of molds that it talks about."

   When I talked with her about this principle, Karen said, "Limiting the number of references is always hard. I want to give 20. But I limit the number so the e-mail isn't overwhelming. In the ideal case, I should put in two or three that will go in completely different directions."

5. Encourage sharing of findings. Karen and Mike almost always request that the person write back to say what they find out. When appropriate, they ask permission to post the findings to inspire others. Last April, a young person named Katie wrote:
   
   "I need to know what kind of fungi grows on Swiss cheese. I am in desperate need to know what molds grow on Swiss cheese."

   Karen suggested a number of helpful resources and contacts, then asked Katie to send her observations:

   "I'd like to hear more about your project. Are you trying to grow your own mold? If you are, take pictures! I'll put your mold photos in the Thinking Fountain. Did you see the grow-n-show gallery of mold? Let me know if you discover anything about the mysterious mold."

   Sometimes their encouragement to share findings was as simple as: "Good luck with your research, I hope this helps. If you come across something interesting, tell me about it."

   In the messages, I saw plenty of evidence for another of Tom Simpson's suggestion that a person asking for information "may be knocking on the door, hoping that the door will open to a conversation, to some sort of revelation, something exciting which she's searching out." The hope for something more than information is clear in this message:

   "Dear Karen, We also raise Monarchs and we want to know if you are freezing monarchs, and if so, why? We live in Annandale, Minnesota. We are 12 and 13 years old. e-mail us back if you have time, we would really enjoy it because nobody else will e-mail us back. We keep track-- if they are boys or girls, and next year we are going to tag them. -- Heather and Jamie.

   After Karen replied, they wrote:

   Karen, Thank you for returning our letter. I have been raising Monarchs 4 years including this year. Heather has been doing it for two. Last year we each raised about 35 monarchs. So far this year we have 80 total. So far we have had by far more boys than girls. My 4th grade teacher taught me about monarchs, he teaches the whole 4th grade. If anyone has any questions that you want to or anyone else wants to ask us, just e-mail us. I have a question for you, though. I had a monarch caterpillar about one-fourth the size they should be before they make a chrysalis and it tried to make a chrysalis. It fell off before it was finished. Would it have made it and is there a reason that it went up there too early??? (it had lots of food in with it.) --Your Friends, Heather and Jamie.