Using Log Files To Track Students’ Model-based Inquiry

We report on the Modeling Across the Curriculum Project (mac.concord.org), a 5-year study funded by the IERI program (IERI # 0115699). In this project we are using qualitative model-based tools for inquiry in three science domains (Genetics, Gas Laws, & Newtonian Mechanics) to promote scientific literacy on a broad scale, namely, content knowledge, process skills, and epistemologies of science (Perkins, 1986). The process skills we focus on in this project are model-based inquiry skills; epistemological constructs of interest here are students’ epistemologies of models as a subset of epistemology of science (Gobert & Discenna, 1997; Schwartz & White, 1999). Our technological infrastructure, Pedagogica TM (Horwitz & Burke, 2002) logs all students’ interactions with our hypermodels (Horwitz & Christie, 1999). We use students’ log files as performance assessments of model-based inquiry on inquiry tasks called “hot spots” and track changes in inquiry skills over time both within and across domains.