D2.4 Guidance and assessment tutorial: Inquiry Guidance and Assessment Tutorial

The weSPOT project aims at propagating scientific inquiry as the approach for science learning and teaching in combination with today’s curricula and teaching practices. It lowers the threshold for linking everyday life with science teaching in schools by technology. weSPOT supports the meaningful contextualization of scientific concepts by relating them to personal curiosity, experiences, and reasoning. weSPOT addresses several challenges in the area of science learning and technology support for building personal conceptual knowledge. The project focuses on inquiry-based learning with a theoretically sound and technology supported personal inquiry approach. The project is focused on three main development aspects: (a) define a reference model for inquiry-based learning skills, (b) create a diagnostic instrument for measuring inquiry skills, and (c) implement a working environment that allows the easy linking of inquiry activities with school curricula and legacy systems. The foreseen weSPOT Toolkit gives smart support for personal scientific inquiry to address a lack of scientific inquiry skills in an age group of 12-25. The current deliverable, D2.4, outlines the inquiry guidance and assessment tutorial, to support teachers in their quest for scientific inquiry. The inquiry guidance tutorial includes several items that will introduce the weSPOT IBL model to the teachers, provide them with examples of how to use it in practice, describe the available tools and show them how they work. This diagnostic tutorial is focused on the diagnostic instrument which will look at the entire inquiry life cycle which may start with the formulation of a research question and may end with the valorisation of the results and it will cover the four different complexities of inquiry, from confirmation inquiry to open, self-directed inquiry. The second part of the deliverable focuses on the diagnostic framework describing the adopted approach. The weSPOT diagnostic instrument for inquiry skills and competences aimed at a) to establish a European baseline of the current level of inquiry skills in the target group and b) to demonstrate the potential of the weSPOT-technology for STEM-learning in general.