Inquire Biology: A Textbook that Answers Questions

Abstract

L earning a scientific discipline such as biology is a daunting challenge. In a typical advanced high school or introductory college biology course, a student is expected to learn about 5000 concepts and several hundred thousand new relationships among them. 1 Science textbooks are difficult to read and yet there are few alternative resources for study. Despite the great need for science graduates, too few students are willing to study science and many drop out without completing their degrees. New approaches are needed to provide students with a more usable and useful resource and to accelerate their learning.The goal of the Inquire Biology textbook is to provide better learning experiences to students, especially those students who hesitate to ask questions. 2 We wish to create an engaging learning experience for students so that more students can succeed -and specifically to engage students in more actively processing the large number of concepts and relationships. Inquire Biology aims to achieve this by interactive features focused on the relationships among concepts, because the process of making sense of scientific concepts is strongly related to the process of understanding relationships among concepts (National Research Council 1999). To encourage students' engagement in active reading, our pedagogical approach is to help a student to articulate questions about relationships among concepts and to support them in finding the answers.Inquire Biology incorporates multiple technologies from the field of artificial intelligence. It includes a formal knowledge representation of the content of the textbook, reasoning methods for answering questions, natural language processing to understand a user's questions, and natural language generation to produce answers. It is based on a systematic knowledge-acquisition process that educators can use to represent the textbook's knowledge in a way that the computer can reason with to answer and suggest questions. A unique

Reasoning about interruption of biological processes

“…We described how this approach generalizes to over 100 questions from a test suite. Empirical evaluation of the approach and its embedding into a student-centric instantiation of the AURA system such as Inquire (Chaudhri et al, 2013) remains an open problem for future work.…”

“…Our approach based on suggested questions has been implemented in the intelligent textbook Inquire (Chaudhri et al, 2013), which uses AURA for question answering, and has been found to work effectively. The process interruption reasoning questions considered here are not yet available in Inquire.…”

“…Our work is in the context of the AURA system for representing knowledge in textbook and answering questions by deductive reasoning (Chaudhri et al, 2013;Gunning et al, 2010). The AURA knowledge base (Chaudhri, Clark, Overholtzer, & Spaulding, 2014, Chaudhri, Elenius, Hinojoza, & Wessel, 2014 consists of a set of hierarchically organized classes and relations.…”

“…In a typical advanced high school or introductory university-level biology course, a student is expected to learn about 5000 new concepts and several hundred thousand new relationships among them (Chaudhri et al, 2013). Science textbooks are difficult to digest and yet there are few alternative resources for students.…”

Sources of Evidence-of-Learning: Learning and assessment in the era of big data

“…Such is the project of companies like Knewton, who are working with publishers to embed adaptive tests into textbooks (Waters, 2014). Or, the other way around, questions and responses to questions can be used to direct you to places in a textbook (Chaudhri et al, 2013a). Advanced applications of these technologies include machine learning environments in which difficulty ranking of selected response items is crowdsourced based on patterns of response to particular questions in relation to student profiles (Segal, Katzir, Gal, Shani, & Shapira, 2014).…”