Inquiry skills are critical to virtually any kind of problem solving and particularly to the practice of science. However, these skills cannot be easily assessed using traditional static assessment items, in which it is difficult to follow (and capture) the actual inquiry process. Given a sufficiently interactive task, the challenge becomes how to identify and score the inquiry skills applied t...

Torbert et al., 2004) offers both a holistic approach and specific analytic tools to combine inquiry and action in the accomplishing of specific objectives, in the testing of one's This chapter describes action inquiry, a kind of social science that can generate timely action. First, action inquiry studies not just the past, but also the present and future. Second, it is a form of research that...

Inquiry based pedagogies have a strong presence in proof-based undergraduate mathematics courses, but can be difficult to implement in courses that are large, procedural, or highly computational. An introductory course in statistics would thus seem an unlikely candidate for an inquiry based approach, as these courses typically steer well clear of proof, have a list of required topics, and depen...

Our learning environment Science Assistments (www.scienceassistments.org; NSF-DRL# 0733286; NSFDGE# 0742503; NSF-DRL# 1008649; U.S. Dept of Ed.# R305A090170) scaffolds middle school students’ scientific processes, namely, hypothesizing, design of experiments, data interpretation, warranting claims with evidence, and communicating findings for Physical Science, Life Science, and Earth Science. W...

Queries are frequently used by applications in dynamically formed mobile networks to discover and acquire information and services available in the surrounding environment. A number of inquiry strategies exist, each of which embodies an approach to disseminating a query and collecting results. The choice of inquiry strategy has different tradeoffs under different operating conditions. Therefore...

This research investigates the detection of student meta-cognitive planning processes in real-time using log tracing techniques. We use fine and coarse-grained data distillation, in combination with coarse-grained text replay coding, in order to develop detectors for students’ planning of experiments in Science Assistments, an assessment and tutoring system for scientific inquiry. The goal is t...

Scientific discovery is about a search for the Truth, for the consistent and predictable in how the universe works. Using a particular method of inquiry, the scientific method, and with acknowledgement of the inherently self-correcting nature of science, scientific inquiry moves forward incrementally to ever closer approximations of the Truth. This paper reviews the history of scientific inquir...

BACKGROUND High profile accounts of failures in patient care reflect an urgent need for transformational development in healthcare. Appreciative Inquiry is promoted as an approach to exploring and bringing about change in social systems. Appreciative Inquiry has been used extensively in North American business since the late 1980s. The application of Appreciative Inquiry may have merit in the c...

This paper documents the naturally occurring ways in which very young children encounter opportunities for inquiry in their everyday lives. Understanding these early childhood practices is a necessary first step in drawing on these practices as resources for science inquiry learning. Using approximately 35 hours of interactional video data of a twoyear-old girl in home and preschool settings, I...

It has long been a goal of science education in the United States that students leave school with a robust understanding of the nature of science. Decades of research show that this does not happen. Inquiry-based instruction is advocated as a means for developing such understanding, although there is scant direct evidence that it does. There is a gap between what is known about students’ inquir...