Cross-disciplinary, authentic student research projects

In the Dutch secondary education system, students must carry out at the end of their school career a rather large research or design project to demonstrate their ability to apply acquired knowledge and skills while pursuing a research question or design goal in some depth. They are encouraged to choose the topic themselves and they are to some extent free in setting up their work. Ideally, the students do not only see it as a compulsory subject but also enjoy the stimulating aspects of doing their own research or design. Challenging and authentic projects, which are representative for actual research and design work done by professionals, seem effective in this respect. The focus of this paper is on how the use of ICT for data acquisition, video-analysis, modelling, and data analysis can contribute to the realisation of such projects in mathematics and science education and on how it can give students opportunities to take the nature and level of their work close to the characteristics of work of experts in the field. We present two examples of students’ inquiry work, in the context of bungee jumping and human gait, and we discuss the ICT usage, the authenticity and resemblance with an expert’s approach.