can be particularly beneficial for developing
early knowledge, and how IPL materials facilitate this process. Notably, not
any student production will help—“doing” does not guarantee “doing with understanding.”
For example, Barron et al. (1998) found that children, when asked to design
a school fun fair as a math project, spent their time excitedly designing attractive
fun booths rather than thinking about the quantitative issues of feasibility and
expense. Therefore, it is important to design productive experiences that help students
generate the types of early knowledge that are likely to help them learn. We
describe how IPL tries to maximize the potential benefits of invention. The third
section offers an example of what student invention looks like. The fourth section
introduces the larger instructional cycle, including the teacher’s role in that cycle.
Finally, the fifth section introduces our ideas about assessing preparation for future
learning, and we describe the assessment experiment and its logic