ABSTRACT
Reform movements in science education have been urging that students have the opportunity to engage in the practice of scientific inquiry (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Research Council, 1996). Teaching students the skills of planning and interpreting experiments is difficult. Students often focus on the doing, obtaining desired outcomes rather than on learning about causes and effects. That is, they often focus on doing rather than learning (Schauble, Klopfer, & Raghavan, 1991). To learn how to design and interpret the results of experiments, students need appropriate scientific problem-solving experiences and guidance to help shape the experience, model the inquiry process, and encourage reflection. One approach is to simplify these experiences to make inquiry accessible to learners, but an alternative approach is to provide authentic inquiry experiences and scaffold students in dealing with the complexity (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002). In this chapter, I discuss how technology-supported learning environments can provide rich contexts to support learning through problem solving. I present a framework for designing scaffolding in such environments, and in particular, discuss how and why those might be instantiated in technology-based inquiry learning environments. Finally, I relate this framework to the problem of helping students learn through problem solving in the context of scientific inquiry by (a) explaining how this framework was used prospectively to design scaffolding for inquiry learning in the Oncology Thinking Cap (OncoTCAP; Hmelo et al., 2001) and (b) presenting an empirical study of the use of scaffolded inquiry in the OncoTCAP environment.
