An engineering process for constructing scaffolded work environments to support student inquiry: a case study in history

Abstract

Inquiry-based curricula encourage students to develop research and collaboration skills by working with evidence and exploring real problems. Students engaging in inquiry projects must be supported in learning the content and work practices of a domain. SWEets, or scaffolded work environments, are one method of providing this support. We present a new software engineering process for designing SWEets for any educational domain and describe the application of this process to the development of Clio, a Web-based SWEet for high school history students. The Clio SWEet was piloted in two classroom studies and preliminary data indicate that students were able to use the software to successfully gather and analyze data as part of an inquiry-based classroom curriculum.