Developing inquiry skills through scaffolded use of a simulation

University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute Paper or Poster Presentation Abstract Teaching students the skills of planning and interpreting experiments is difficult. Students tend to focus on obtaining desired outcomes rather than on understanding causes and effects. Inquiry skills are increasingly important for students entering the health professions who may later conduct large-scale research such as clinical trials or be required to interpret the results of such research. To learn how to design and interpret the results of experiments, these students must have appropriate experiences and support to help shape the experience, model the inquiry process, and encourage reflection. Simulations offer promise for providing these experiences. One such simulation environment, the Oncology Thinking Cap (OncoTCap) provides a comprehensive modeling workbench for cancer researchers. This tool is versatile and can be used to model clinical trials, but its functions and operation may impose excessive cognitive load for the novice. Also, novices may have little knowledge of the kinds of experimental designs used in cancer research. There are well-defined designs for clinical trials of new drugs, used at different stages of testing and for different purposes. As Baker and Dunbar (1996) note, the expert scientist often has a mental schema with slots to be filled with the items needed to determine an experimental design. Work on software-realized scaffolding suggests that communicating the design process is one way that learners can begin to construct these schemas. In this paper, we report on the design, use, and evaluation of a special purpose interface, the Phase II Trial Design wizard, to help scaffold medical students’ design of an experiment to test a new cancer drug.