nQuire: Technological Support for Personal Inquiry Learning

Abstract

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 different devices (smart phone, netbook, PC) and does not rely on constant connectivity.

Personal Inquiry: Orchestrating Science Investigations Within and Beyond the Classroom

“…Prototypes of nQuire were combined with data probes, global positioning system devices, and cameras to form the Personal Inquiry Toolkit, which was evaluated in studies with schools at Nottingham and Milton Keynes, followed by a further cycle of development and testing involving school, outdoor, and home settings. Mulholland et al (2011) gives a more detailed account of the software design and technology implementation of the toolkit.…”

Inquiring Rock Hunters

“…The aim of Inquiring Rock Hunters is to support members of the public in designing and engaging in scientific investigations on rocks through an online community of inquiry. Geologists (experts and non-experts) having a shared interest in geology interact and exchange knowledge and methods supported and guided by the tools within the web-based inquiry environment, the nQuire platform [3] [4].…”

Shared orchestration within and beyond the classroom

“…The teacher and students were using an early version of our nQuire technology for inquiry science learning. The teacher was at the front of the class and each student had a netbook computer running nQuire (Mulholland, et al 2011). The teacher was managing a lesson where the students were sharing and analysing field data.…”