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Tools for Scaffolding Inquiry in the Domain of Introductory Genetics

Assuming that scientific inquiry skills are ideally developed in particular domains, domain-specific tools are needed to support student inquiry. In addition to a valid model of the development of reasoning in the domain, other useful tools include technology-supported environments for conducting experiments and engaging in inquiry, and tools for assessing inquiry skills. Our research concerns two such tools in introductory genetics. These tools were developed within a three-year effort to design and implement a system for evaluating student learning in GenScopeTM (Horwitz & Christie, in press; Horwitz, Neumann, & Schwartz, 1996), an open-ended exploratory software tool that students can use to investigate a variety of phenomena in genetics. All work described here was carried out in close collaboration with Paul Horwitz and colleagues now at the Concord Consortium. One tool that we developed, the NewWorm Assessment, was developed around a sophisticated model of reasoning in the domain, which included several different dimensions with each dimension varying according to the complexity of reasoning involved. The NewWorm was designed to scaffold student performance across increasingly complex problems as defined by the reasoning dimensions. Our theoretical analysis of the complexity within dimensions was supported by extensive validity inquiry conducted in a small number of the classrooms where the NewWorm instrument was being used to assess learning in GenScope and comparison environments (Hickey, Wolfe, & Kindfield, in press) and through multifaceted Rasch analysis of the performance of over 500 GenScope and comparison students on the NewWorm Assessment (Hickey & Kindfield, 1999; Hickey, Kindfield, Wolfe, & Heidenberg, 1999; Kindfield, Hickey, & Yessis, 1999). Midway through the project we developed a second tool, the Dragon Investigations, a set of supplementary activities designed to bridge a potential gap between world of GenScope dragons (the primary organism of interest in the software tool) and the world of the NewWorm (the novel organism of interest in the assessment). In essence the Dragon Investigations encouraged students to organize the reasoning skills they were practicing within GenScope around the dimensions of reasoning characteristic of the domain and targeted by the NewWorm Assessment, thus scaffolding student performance from computer-based tool to paper-and-pencil assessment. In this paper, we will address the design and performance of the NewWorm Assessment and Dragon Investigations in completed work and consider how these currently paper-and-pencil tools might be incorporated into the new “scriptable” BioLogicaTM, the next generation of GenScope (Horwitz, 1999) to provide more immediate scaffolding to support student construction of sophisticated reasoning/inquiry skills in genetics.