A General Platform for Inquiry Learning

This research explores the use of software to move higher education towards more active student learning including inquiry, problem-based and cooperative learning. Active students ask their own questions, engage in hypothesis generation, make and test predictions about theories, are involved in reasoning and address their own misunderstandings. These activities place heavy demands on the faculty and are rarely allowed in large classrooms. The challenge is to support this type of inquiry learning without also adding and excessive burden to faculty time.We have built and evaluated software that supports inquiry learning in classrooms. The software supports students to reason about a phenomenon, make mistakes and monitor their own scientific processes. Intelligent tutoring and a discovery approach guide students’ inquiry in problem-cases. The software provides some of the efficiency needed to make inquiry-oriented instruction more widely available and enhance problem-solving activities during classtime.We are expanding this model for inquiry-based learning across three domains, several institutions and teaching style. Student performance will be measured, providing empirical evidence for the portability of inquiry-oriented instruction for college-level classrooms. We will evaluate the comparative results concerning the differential effects of these interventions in each environment.