Case Application Suite: Scaffolding Use of Expert Cases in Middle-School Project-Based Inquiry Classrooms

In our research, we seek to understand how we can effectively help learners to interpret and apply expert cases through software-realized scaffolding designed to augment the teachers’ modeling and coaching in a cognitive apprenticeship. We also seek to understand if exposure to the software’s detailed scaffolding will result in better performance and learning of targeted skills, and if so, what those differences are. This paper presents results from a study we conducted in Fall 2002 where we sought to enhance the way students in project-based middle school classrooms used second-hand expert cases to reason. This enhancement was in the form of a software tool, the Case Application Suite that was designed to scaffold students through some of the difficulties involved in applying expert cases. Its design is based on suggestions from the transfer and case-based reasoning literatures and the approach to education called cognitive apprenticeship. We used the Case Application Suite in Learning By Design classrooms where students learn science in the context of addressing interesting design challenges. In this paper, we discuss the design of the software and the study, present and analyze data regarding the software’s effectiveness and student performance, and draw some conclusions about the effectiveness of the software and the feasibility of sharing scaffolding responsibilities between teacher, peers, and software.