The Virtual Telescopes in Education (VTIE) project, is providing tools for teaching astronomy in K-12 classrooms using remotely controlled telescopes. VTIE's main goal to promote scientific literacy, including a conceptual understanding of the physical world and the scientific process itself. This paper describes an essential component of VTIE: the Scientific Investigation System for Telescopes in Education Research (SISTER). Students are aided in the preparation of their observing proposal by a novel Glossary Tool for dynamically inducing hyperlinks tailored to a student's reading level, a. Proposal Generation Interface to guide them through the process of formulating a scientific question, and a Paper Writing Tool to report the results of the analysis of the data. In this paper we present the architecture and methodology for SISTER..
Susan Hoban, John G. Keating, Joel Sachs, Daniel L