Project Activities
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Product: Through previous development grants from IES and the National Science Foundation, researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute developed 16 virtual laboratory simulations and 57 inquiry activities aligned to Next Generation Science standards in physical, life, and earth science. This project developed Inq-Blotter, a dashboard to provide teachers real-time formative and summative assessment reports on middle school students doing science inquiry. When using the Inq-Blotter reporting dashboard, teachers receive class and student-level reports, automatically generated in real-time as students work through laboratory activities. The dashboard also includes teacher resources to support the alignment of the labs to learning goals, and to assist with implementation.
Project website:
Supplemental information
Video Demonstration of the Phase I Prototype: https://youtu.be/zHuPK-rMQec
In Phase II of the project, the team fully developed the back-end assessment system and teacher dashboard with alerts of student progress, and integrated additional content for life science and earth science. After development concluded, researchers conducted a pilot study by implementing Inq-Blotter in 8 classrooms with results demonstrating that the product's usability, fidelity of implementation. To evaluate the promise of Inq-Blotter for providing formative assessment reports to teachers and for improving student learning outcomes, the team conducted a randomized control trial with 8 middle school teachers and 280 students in these classes. Half of the teachers were randomly assigned to use the Inq-Blotter to use formative assessment data to inform instruction in their classrooms, while the other half of teachers will use virtual laboratories. Results demonstrated that teachers who used Inq-Blotter were able to provide twice as much feedback and support to twice as many students than teachers who did not. Students in the treatment group increased significantly compared to students in control in their performance on their next Inq-ITS lab for interpreting data and warranting claims competencies. In another pilot study with 4 teachers and 25 students, student's increased competency for performing lab inquiry activities was predicted based on the feedback teachers provided, driven by information from the alerts.
Related Government Projects: University researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Rutgers Graduate School of Education created and evaluated the efficacy of over 35 Inq-ITS virtual laboratory simulations and 180 inquiry activities aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards for middle school physical, life, and earth science on prior ED/IES (R305A090170, R305A120778) and National science Foundation (DRL#0733286, DGE#0742503, DRL#1008649, DRL#1252477, DRL#1643673,) grants. To productize this research, Apprendis developed and tested the efficacy of Inq-Blotter (ED-IES-15C0018, ED-IES-16C0014), a dashboard to provide teachers real-time diagnostic alerts on how middle school students struggle to conduct science inquiry practices. University researchers further examined Inq-Blotter's classroom impacts (NSF-IIS#1629045).With 2018 and 2019 ED/IES SBIR awards, Apprendris is developing Inq-ITS for high school physical science.
Questions about this project?
To answer additional questions about this project or provide feedback, please contact the program officer.
