weSPOT: A personal and social toolkit for inquiry-based learning

weSPOT is a new European initiative proposing a novel approach for personal and social inquiry-based learning in secondary and higher education. weSPOT aims at enabling students to create their mash-ups out of cloud-based tools and services in order to perform scientific investigations. Students will also be able to share their inquiry accomplishments in social networks and receive feedback from the learning environment and their peers. This paper presents the research framework of the weSPOT project, as well as the initial inquiry-based learning scenarios that will be piloted by the project in real-life educational settings.

2013

Abstract: weSPOT is a new European initiative proposing a novel approach for personal and social inquiry-based learning in secondary and higher education. weSPOT aims at enabling students to create their mash-ups out of cloud-based tools and services in order to perform scientific investigations. Students will also be able to share their inquiry accomplishments in social networks and receive feedback from the learning environment and their peers. This paper presents the research framework of the weSPOT project, as well as the initial inquiry-based learning scenarios that will be piloted by the project in real-life educational settings.

The International Journal of Science, Mathematics and Technology Learning, 2014

The weSPOT project aims at propagating scientific inquiry as the approach for science learning and teaching in combination with today's curricula and teaching practices The project focuses on inquiry-based learning with a theoretically sound and technology supported personal inquiry approach and it contains three main development aspects: (a) define a reference model for inquiry-based learning skills, (b) create a diagnostic instrument for measuring inquiry skills, and (c) implement a working environment that allows the easy linking of inquiry activities with school curricula and legacy systems. The current work outlines the pedagogical and diagnostic frameworks for scientific inquiry. The pedagogical framework is aimed at supporting informal, self-regulated learning settings as well as the embedding in a formal learning context. The scientific exploration process can take place independently, or in collaboration with others. The diagnostic framework focuses on the pedagogical diagnosis, which will be tailored to the ambitious aim of inferring students' inquiry and meta-cognitive skills as well as domain-specific knowledge from observational data tracked within the weSPOT environment. Pilot studies planned to be conducted in 16 test-beds across 6 EU countries will test the reference model and make use of the diagnostic instrument.

2016

This paper describes the development of nQuire, a software application to guide personal inquiry learning. nQuire provides teacher support for authoring, orchestrating and monitoring inquiries as well as student support for carrying out, configuring and reviewing inquiries. nQuire allows inquiries to be scripted and configured in various ways, so that personally relevant, rather than off-the-shelf inquiries, can be created and used by teachers and students. nQuire incorporates an approach to specifying learning flow that provides flexible access to current inquiry activities without precluding access to other activities for review and orientation. Dependencies between activities are automatically handled, ensuring decisions made by the student or teacher are propagated through the inquiry. nQuire can be used to support inquiry activities across individual, group and class levels at different parts of the inquiry and offers a flexible, web-based approach that can incorporate differen...

Artificial Intelligence in …, 2011

We describe nQuire, a constraint-based learning toolkit to support a continuity of inquiry based learning between classroom and non-formal settings. The paper proposes design requirements for personal inquiry learning environments that support learning of personally meaningful science topics with development of metacognitive understanding and self-regulation of the scientific process through situated practice. It introduces a generic implementable model of the inquiry process, and describes an instantiation in the nQuire learning environment. An example of the use of the toolkit for a Healthy Eating inquiry with 28 Year 9 students concludes with results of the trial, design issues and recommendations.

Math, science and technology (MST) education in Europe is significantly based on experiments and problem solving. The innovative project weSPOT aims at enhancing MST education by emphasizing scientific inquiry, individualization of learning and the role of social interaction. To achieve this goal, students are supported by a set of software tools, helping them to plan, implement, comment and document their personal scientific experiments. The students are encouraged to share and discuss their experience and to learn how to conduct scientific research. They share their achievements in class as well as in their own social community (friends, family, scientists, etc.). This paper describes in details the scientific approach which is the base for the pilot experiments of the weSPOT methodology. It presents the first pilot of Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) conducted in the First Privite Mathematical School and analyses applicability of the used software products.

Educational Media International, 2010

The University of Nottingham and the Open University are partners in a ca. £1.2m project to help school students learn the skills of modern science. The three-year project, Personal Inquiry (PI) 1 (funded by the UK ESRC and EPSRC research councils), is developing a new approach of 'scripted inquiry learning', where children investigate a science topic with classmates by carrying out explorations between their classroom, homes and discovery centres, guided by a personal computer. This paper describes our progress to date on the development of four models for inquiry-based learning, as part of the PI project. These are being used as the basis for the development of educational scenarios and associated scripts to explore the use of mobile technologies in supporting an inquiry-based approach to teaching Scientific thinking across formal and informal learning.

2010

Supporting learning across different contexts can be challenging. Defining formal, informal and nonformal learning is the subject of continuing debate as each can be difficult to describe. We report on a study that evaluated the effectiveness of a Personal Inquiry toolkit on supporting personal inquiries into the sustainability of the food cycle, carried out across the contexts of home and an after school club in a UK secondary school. The toolkit consisted of a web-based Sustainability Investigator that could be accessed from any ...

Collaborative inquiry learning is one of the most challenging and exciting ventures for today's schools. It aims at bringing a new and promising culture of teaching and learning into the classroom where students in groups engage in self-regulated learning activities supported by the teacher. It is expected that this way of learning fosters students' motivation and interest in science, that they learn to perform steps of inquiry similar to scientists and that they gain knowledge on scientific processes. Starting from general pedagogical reflections and science standards, the article reviews some prominent models of inquiry learning. This comparison results in a set of inquiry processes being the basis for cooperation in the scientific network NetCoIL. Inquiry learning is conceived in several ways with emphasis on different processes. For an illustration of the spectrum, some main conceptions of inquiry and their focuses are described. In the next step, the article describes exemplary computer tools and environments from within and outside the NetCoIL network that were designed to support processes of collaborative inquiry learning. These tools are analysed by describing their functionalities as well as effects on student learning known from the literature. The article closes with challenges for further developments elaborated by the NetCoIL network.

It is reported that, without appropriate support, students might face several difficulties when engaging in highlevel reasoning in science. This paper discusses the design of a software-based tool to support students' inquiry. This scaffolding is provided through the use of STOCHASMOS, a web-based platform designed to support teachers' authoring of inquiry-based learning environments and students' reflective inquiry practices. In this paper, we present the theoretical background supporting the development of STOCHASMOS, present the platform and discuss findings from a classroom study. The results have wider implications for the design of webbased learning environments and for the role of self-and group-reflections in facilitating inquiry processes with scientific data.