Educational Software Boosts Inquiry Skills

Inquiry-based education has gained numerous supporters in the educational community, and many students enjoy learning in a more active, constructive, problem-based environment. But the challenge is that the educational results aren't always ideal. In fact, for some lower-performing students, the more open-ended nature of inquiry-based investigations can pose challenges, and researchers have argued that students need guidance in becoming effective investigators.

Building effective explanations and arguments is a key feature of most inquiry projects, and, one could argue, is a skill that's at the heart of good science. The authors of this paper, researchers from Cyprus, argue that developing these skills requires a more reflective approach to inquiry in which students plan, monitor, and evaluate their investigation, and “reflective inquiry scaffolding” can help them do just that. They explain, “The term 'scaffolding' is used to describe situations when a more knowledgeable person helps the learner progress within their zone of proximal development, reaching the point where assistance is no longer required to perform the initial task.” In other words, an instructor--or, in the case of this paper, a computer program--helps a student along, providing guidance, prompts, suggestions, and other tools until a student understands what to do on his or her own.

Another key aspect of inquiry education is collaboration. Almost always, students work in groups to solve problems within the inquiry model. The authors cite previous research that has concluded, not surprisingly, that “merely having students work together will not automatically lead to increased cognitive gains.” Instead, they explain, “individual characteristics, group composition, and the nature of the task have been identified as important.” They also note that group size is important, with much of the research pointing to pairs and small groups as most effective for learning.

In this paper, the authors investigated the quality of work of students pairs on an ecological inquiry project. Could the students, paired according to their cognitive ability, develop valid, evidence-based explanations and arguments? And could a computer program that provided reflective scaffolding improve the results?

The researchers worked with two sixth-grade classes in a suburban school in Cyprus. Both classes were taught by the same instructor, using the same information, delivered in much the same way. Both classes used the web-based STOCHASMOS software to investigate a scientific mystery in which a large number of flamingos died suddenly at Larnaca Salt Lake. The software gave the students access to information and data about the ecosystem organized into meaningful chunks in the form of text, images, video, and sound. The software also included a glossary, a graphing tool, and hints to provide help. Interestingly, the graphing tool is included because previous research indicates that certain smaller tasks within the larger task, such as creating a graph to make sense of large amounts of data, can be distracting for some students, causing them to spend too much time on the wrong task. The authors explain, “Providing tools to automatically create graphs can focus the learners' cognitive resources on the conceptual issues of which graphs to generate and how to interpret them,” rather than on relatively less important details of how to construct the graph.

The students were asked to solve the mystery of why the flamingos died, presenting a persuasive argument to explain their position. The teacher instructed that the explanation should include the students' claim, reasoning for the claim, and data to support the claim. The argument should also refute other possible explanations, with evidence to support why the other explanations are not accurate. The only difference between the two classes was the tools they were given to organize their arguments. One group was asked to use PowerPoint while the other class was given access to another part of the STOCHASMOS software called WorkSpace. WorkSpace includes scaffolds that help students organize their data and explain their arguments. The software includes templates that help students formulate their hypothesis, gather data, and support their explanation. PowerPoint was selected because it's commonly used by the students but does not include scaffolding.

The researchers administered tests to determine the students' cognitive ability, and asked the students to complete pre- and post-tests measuring their ecosystem understanding. The students were grouped in pairs according to their cognitive ability, either with both students of high ability, both low ability, or a mix of high and low ability. The researchers then analyzed the pairs' final work products and the results of the pre- and post-tests.

For the students who used PowerPoint, the high- and mixed-ability groups outperformed the low-ability groups of students in developing their arguments. But in the class that used the WorkSpace-scaffolded program, the differences disappeared; all of the groups performed about the same, regardless of their mix of cognitive ability. The results suggest that lower-ability students benefit from the scaffolding provided by the WorkSpace program. When the scaffolding wasn't available, the lower-ability students' quality of work was lower than their higher-performing peers. But in the class that used the scaffolding, the lower-ability students performed at the same level as their higher-ability classmates. The authors acknowledge, though, that the sample size for this study was small and that further research could confirm the results.