Personal Inquiry project full details
Personal Inquiry
Designing for evidence-based inquiry learning across formal and informal settings
The Personal Inquiry (PI) project is a collaboration between the University of Nottingham and researchers from CREET and KMi in The Open University. The aim of PI is to develop a new approach of scripted inquiry learning in which students aged 11-14 can use personal technologies to guide scientific investigations that span the classroom, home and field locations.
Activities will be based around topic themes - Myself, My Environment, My Community - that engage young learners in investigating their health, diet and fitness, their immediate environment and their wider surroundings. These topics are key elements of the new 21st century science curriculum that requires students to reason about the natural sciences as a complex system and to explore how people relate to the physical world.
Other partners include Hadden Park High School in Nottingham, Oakgrove School in Milton Keynes, ScienceScope, a company that develops sensing and datalogging equipment, Nottingham Museums and Galleries, Milton Keynes City Discovery Centre and Gulliver's Eco-Park, Milton Keynes.
PI is a three year project funded by the UK ESRC and EPSRC research councils.
Sharples, M., Scanlon, E., Ainsworth, S., Anastopoulou, S., Collins, T., Crook, C., Jones, A., Kerawalla, L., Littleton, K., Mulholland, P. and O'Malley, C. (2015). Personal inquiry: orchestrating science investigations within and beyond the classroom. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 24(2), pp. 308–341. https://oro.open.ac.uk/41623/.
Mikroyannidis, A., Okada, A., Scott, P., Rusman, E., Specht, M., Stefanov, K., Boytchev, P., Protopsaltis, A., Held, P., Hetzner, S., Kikis-Papadakis, K. and Chaimala, F. (2013). weSPOT: A personal and social approach to inquiry-based learning. Journal of Universal Computer Science, 19(14), pp. 2093–2111. https://oro.open.ac.uk/39263/.
Mikroyannidis, A. (2013). A personalised approach in informal and inquiry-based learning. In: 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2013), 06-08 May 2013, Aachen, Germany. https://oro.open.ac.uk/39234/.
