The relationship between scientific explanations and the proficiencies of content, inquiry, and writing

Advanced Educational Technology for Science Inquiry Assessment

“…Because linguistic features do not attend to the content of student writing (they focus solely on the use of language), these features are limited in terms of their ability to capture the variety of issues students confront when writing scientific explanations. Some researchers have combined student behavioral features with linguistic features to predict human scores of scientific explanations (Li, Gobert, & Dickler, 2018), but adding behavioral features did not largely increase the performance.…”

“…Students demonstrate messy middle knowledge in terms of content understandings and reasoning abilities (Gotwals & Songer, 2009), and students also demonstrate inconsistencies in performance between their doing and writing in science inquiry contexts (Li, Gobert, & Dickler, 2017b). As a result, assessments should take into account and distinguish between the various forms of student competencies, such as inquiry proficiency, relative to general content knowledge or writing skills (Gobert et al, 2018; Li, Gobert, & Dickler, 2018; Quellmalz et al, 2012).…”

“…Students often have difficulty completing science inquiry tasks without guidance (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007), which calls for integrating carefully designed scaffolds into science inquiry contexts within virtual assessments (Quintana et al, 2004). Real-time feedback facilitates improvements in inquiry practice competencies in terms of both scientific doing competencies (Gobert et al, 2018; Li, Gobert, & Dickler, 2018; Quellmalz et al, 2012) and explanatory writing-based competencies (Tansomboon, Gerard, Vitale, & Linn, 2017).…”

“…Meanwhile, grant agencies should also encourage proposals for assessments in simulated environments that evaluate the full complement of inquiry practices because “doing” inquiry is different from writing about inquiry (Li et al, 2017b). Doing and writing also differ from the content knowledge captured through multiple-choice questions (Li, Gobert, & Dickler, 2018). Students’ overall inquiry competencies need evaluating based on both behaviors and writing rather than traditionally formatted tests.…”

“…The use of computer-based simulations can prevent expenses involved in scoring hands-on labs, reduce learning time, and enable the collection of detailed logs of student–computer interactions (Gobert, Moussavi, Li, Sao Pedro, & Dickler, 2018). Detailed logs include both event logs, such as key clicks, and text logs, such as written responses (Li, Gobert, & Dickler, 2018). The resulting log files containing the data are often massive and complex, making it difficult to identify and extract useful information to directly evaluate students’ inquiry performance.…”