Abductive science inquiry using mobile devices in the classroom

Recent advancements in digital technology have attracted the interest of educators and researchers to develop technology-assisted inquiry-based learning environments in the domain of school science education. Traditionally, school science education has followed deductive and inductive forms of inquiry investigation, while the abductive form of inquiry has previously been sparsely explored in the literature related to computers and education. We have therefore designed a mobile learning application ‘ThinknLearn’, which assists high school students in generating hypotheses during abductive inquiry investigations. The M3 evaluation framework was used to investigate the effectiveness of using ‘ThinknLearn’ to facilitate student learning. The results indicated in this paper showed improvements in the experimental group’s learning performance as compared to a control group in pre-post tests. In addition, the experimental group also maintained this advantage during retention tests as well as developing positive attitudes toward mobile learning. 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.