Personal inquiry learning trajectories in geography: technological support across contexts

Abstract

Student engagement in the design and implementation of inquiries is an effective way for them to learn about the inquiry process and the domain being studied. However, inquiry learning in geography can be challenging for teachers and students due to the complexity of scientific inquiry and the diversity of pupils' and teachers' knowledge and abilities. To address this, the Personal Inquiry project has designed a tool kit that includes nQuire, a Web-based tool to support students through the inquiry process. Here, we identify when, across five lessons comprising an inquiry into microclimates, nQuire was used by a teacher and a case study group of her 12 to 13-year-old students, and the ways in which they adopted nQuire as a tool to facilitate the creation of a coherent and cumulative inquiry learning experience over time. We found that students' use of nQuire supported them in capturing and representing their evolving understanding of inquiry, in defining and supporting their progression through the process of inquiry and in resourcing their cognitive engagement in data interpretation and representation. nQuire supported the students in accumulating and integrating new understandings across contexts and over time. In this way, nQuire successfully resourced and supported the students' learning journeys or trajectories. We conclude that nQuire can be an effective tool for supporting teachers' and students' understanding of the nature of inquiry and how to design and implement inquiries of their own.

Keywords:

• personal inquiry learning
• geography
• microclimates
• secondary school
• scripted inquiry

Acknowledgments

Personal Inquiry is a project funded by the ESRC/EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning programme. Our thanks are due to the work of the teachers and young people in the schools who have been our collaborators and members of the project's stakeholder panels and Advisory Board.

Notes on contributors

Lucinda Kerawalla is a Lecturer in Childhood and Youth Studies. Her research interests include technology-mediated learning, classroom dialogues and mobile learning.

Gráinne Conole is Professor of e-Learning. She has a range of research interests on the use and evaluation of technologies in an educational context. Interests include: learning design, student experience, methodologies, evaluation, learning theory, policy and strategy.

Marilena Petrou was a Research Assistant at the time of this study. Currently she teaches young children in Greek schools in the UK. Her research interests include teachers' pedagogic subject knowledge and classroom dialogue.

Karen Littleton is Professor of Psychology in Education. Karen's research addresses the complex inter-relationship of context and cognition and demonstrates that ways of thinking are embedded in the use of language in social context, and that learning is a fundamentally social process. Her work focuses on understanding the cultural, social and relational nature of children's development and learning.

Eileen Scanlon is Professor of Educational Technology and Associate Director (Research and Scholarship) in the Institute of Educational Technology and led the Personal Inqury project at the Open University. Her research interests include technology enhanced science learning, in both formal and informal settings.

Ann Jones is Reader in Educational Technology. Her research interests lie in the areas of mobile learning and affective issues related to technology use.

Mark Gaved is a Research Associate. His research interests include researching local communities who have worked together to build a computer network infrastructure in order to provide affordable and sustainable access to the internet and to help the sharing and storing of information within and beyond their neighbourhood. He also has an interest in mobile learning and networks.

Trevor Collins is a Research Fellow and he is interested in the development and use of technology to support learning and discovery. Current areas of involvement include museum learning and fieldwork.

Paul Mulholland is a Research Fellow. Much of his research is concerned with how web and knowledge technologies can be used to support learning in different contexts, whether that be informal museum settings (CIPHER, Bletchley Park Text, DECIPHER), informal game-playing for children (TINY-IN), the workplace (CLOCKWORK), at school (PI, SILVER, G-LEARN) or higher education (REFLEX, EuroGene).

Canan Blake is a Research Fellow whose main research interest is technology enhanced learning. Within that broad topic she is interested in collaborative learning and interaction in computer supported learning environments, mobile learning, technology enhanced learning in science and in work places and open learning and open educational resources (OER).

Gill Clough is a Research Associate whose main research interests are location-aware mobile technologies, social technologies and their implications for informal learning. Currently she is working on xDelia, an EU project exploring how serious games linked to physiological sensors can be used to identify and address the impact of emotional biases on the financial decision-making of private investors.

Notes

1. A microclimate is a local atmospheric zone where climate differs from surrounding areas. It is a term that is familiar, for example, to gardeners, as some plants cannot be positioned in direct sunlight, or in shade, or in the windy areas of a garden. Similarly, microclimates exist in towns such as when tall buildings form wind tunnels or when high pollution levels increase air temperature.

2. The version of nQuire used in this study has since been upgraded. The new version maintains an identical underlying inquiry structure in terms of phases, stages and activities and can be seen at http://www.nquire.org.uk/.

3. We are grateful to Sciencescope (http://www.sciencescope.co.uk/) for the generous loan of equipment.

4. http://www.atlasti.com/

5. The research team adopted the practice of spelling ‘inquiry’ with an ‘i’. ‘Enquiry’ in the United Kingdom has recently become associated with casual information seeking whereas ‘inquiry’ might be associated with a more formal investigation. In other countries, the words are synonymous. The teachers in the current study spelt this word as ‘enquiry’ in their teaching resources and it appears in curriculum documents in this way, so it has been reproduced as such here.

6. MUGA is an acronym for multi-use games area; in this case, a cushioned sports surface surrounded by a wire mesh fence that is used for tennis or basketball etc.