Chapter 10: Inquiry and Assessment: Future Developments from a Technological Perspective

In this chapter we present an overview of on-line assessment of inquiry learning. We take learners who are involved in a technology enhanced inquiry learning environment as our starting point. These learners leave traces in the form of activity logs, chats, and products designed (models, hypotheses etc.). The traces can be used to analyze different aspects of the inquiry process, such as, for example, the students’ experimentation behavior or hypothesis quality. Results can also be used to inform students on their inquiry process or developing knowledge or to trigger instructional interventions. In this chapter we present a few examples of on-line assessment and its use, and we highlight techniques that are used for this.