Identifying potential types of guidance for supporting student inquiry when using virtual and remote labs in science: a literature review

Abstract

The aim of this review is to identify specific types of guidance for supporting student use of online labs, that is, virtual and remote labs, in an inquiry context. To do so, we reviewed the literature on providing guidance within computer supported inquiry learning (CoSIL) environments in science education and classified all identified guidance according to a recent taxonomy of types of guidance. In addition, we classified the types of guidance in phases of inquiry. Moreover, we examined whether the types of guidance identified for each inquiry phase were found to be effective in promoting student learning, as documented in the CoSIL research. This review identifies what types of effective guidance currently exist and can be applied in developing future CoSIL environments, especially CoSIL environments with online labs. It also highlights the needs/shortcomings of these available types of guidance. Such information is crucial for the design and development of future CoSIL environments with online labs.

Supporting learners’ experiment design

“…Effective forms of guidance for designing fruitful experiments include providing learners with heuristics and giving them scaffolds. Heuristics are rules of thumb in the form of hints and suggestions about how to carry out certain actions (Zacharia et al 2015). Examples of heuristics for designing experiments are 'vary one thing at a time', 'assign simple values to the independent variable', and 'keep records of what you are doing' (Klahr and Dunbar 1988;Veermans et al 2006).…”

“…CVS allows the learner to conclude that any effect on the dependent variable can be attributed to the one variable that was varied. In their overview of inquiry support, Zacharia et al (2015) show that CVS is the most popular heuristic used to support experimentation.…”

Guidance Provided by Teacher and Simulation for Inquiry-Based Learning: a Case Study

“…The result is an inquiry cycle consisting of five phases: stimulating interest (orientation), stating theory-based questions and/or hypotheses (conceptualization), planning and carrying out investigations (investigation), drawing conclusions based on the data (conclusion), and communicating the information to others and reflecting on one's own actions (discussion). This paper uses Pedaste et al's definition of inquiry since it is based on earlier definitions of inquiry and has already been used to study guidance provided by simulations for inquiry-based learning (Zacharia et al, 2015).…”

“…These issues may be exacerbated by the use of simulations instead of physical, hands-on experiments. This is because the high information content of simulations and the difficulty of extracting information from them (Zacharia et al, 2015) increases the need for metacognitive skills (Hegarty, 2004). Empirical research on inquiry learning has shown that providing assistance-e.g., feedback, worked examples, or elicited explanations during the inquiry learning process-benefits learners and improves learning outcomes (Alfieri et al, 2011).…”

“…Zacharia et al (2015) reviewed the existing research on guidance for inquiry learning using virtual laboratories (i.e., simulations) and online laboratories. This review only addressed guidance provided by the computer software-the simulation or accompanying software.…”