An intelligent tutoring system and teacher dashboard to support mathematizing during science inquiry

Abstract

Using mathematics is critical to science inquiry at the high school level and is predictive of students’ later success in STEM college majors and careers. Inq-ITS (Inquiry Intelligent Tutoring System) has recently added mathematizing functionalities in order to support students in the mathematical practices needed for scientific inquiry, and our teacher alerting dashboard, Inq-Blotter, is being extended to alert teachers in real-time to students’ difficulties with this practice. Mathematizing in science can be challenging as students must attend to multiple sources of information (i.e., graphs, data tables), as well as do graphing and modeling. In the present paper, I describe three studies on the use of Inq-Blotter to support students on mathematizing in which I: (1) explore students’ eye-movements and think-aloud protocols while mathematizing in Inq-ITS to identify the proportion of mathematizing difficulties that are related to knowledge acquisition processes versus other mathematical competencies (e.g., graph building and modeling), (2) examine if alerts within Inq-Blotter permit teachers to identify students who need help most (relative to teachers without access to alerts), and (3) identify whether teacher support based on alerts leads to improvements on students’ next opportunity to engage in mathematizing and examine the corresponding teacher discourse associated with students’ gains. These studies will indicate how to support students on mathematizing with intelligent technologies.