Research in inquiry learning currently focuses on finding scaffolds or cognitive tools that help to alleviate these problems and produce effective and efficient learning situations. Computer environments can integrate these cognitive tools with the simulation.

Inquiry learning is an approach to learning that involves a techniques or process of exploring the natural or material world, and that leads to asking questions, making discoveries, and rigorously testing those discoveries in the search for new understanding. Learners adopt this scientific approach and make their own discoveries.

Examples of cognitive tools that computer environment integrate are assignments. That is exercises that set the simulation in the appropriate state such as explanations and background information, monitoring tools to help students keep track of their experiments, hypothesis scratchpads (software tools to create hypotheses from predefined variables and relations), predefined hypotheses, experimentation hints such as “vary one thing at a time” or “try extreme values”, process coordinators which guide the students through the complete inquiry cycle, and planning tools. Examples of integrated inquiry systems are SimQuest applications, GenScope, and Inquiry Island.

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