Teaching and Measuring Multidimensional Inquiry Skills using Interactive Simulations

Interactive simulations play a significant role in science education, serving as a platform for inquiry-based learning and fostering the development of scientific knowledge and skills. However, teaching and quantitatively measuring inquiry strategies has proven to be challenging due to their complex and inherently multidimensional nature. Our study goes beyond the prevalent focus on the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS) in prior work by incorporating additional relevant inquiry strategies in both teaching and measurement: exploring the variable range and conducting experiments under optimal conditions. We tested two different instructional approaches to jointly teach the three strategies by focusing either on data collection or on data interpretation. 161 chemistry apprentices were randomly assigned to one of the two instructional conditions or a control group without instruction and engaged in experimentation using an interactive simulation. In order to analyze joint strategy use, we applied a multi-step clustering method to students' log data that helped identify multidimensional student profiles of inquiry strategies. We found four profiles that related differently to conceptual learning, suggesting that combining strategies is more effective for conceptual learning than utilizing them individually. We also found that students instructed on data collection increased the use of strategy combinations with an emphasis on CVS. This suggests a potential avenue for assessing instruction efficacy, indicating that the impact may be strategy-specific. Source code and materials are released at https://github.com/epfl-ml4ed/inquiry-skills.