The Biology Sleuth: evaluation of an interactive learning environment

The Biology Sleuth is an interactive learning environment developed to study the use of computers to teach both health science content and diagnosis to secondary students. Its design centers around the following four explicitly identified teaching goals: to help students to learn how to form hypotheses to explain patterns of data; to teach students to recognize that several alternative hypotheses may explain the same pattern of data; to teach students that further testing may allow refinement of a set of hypotheses; to help students learn how to identify pieces of data which may be more diagnostic than others, and to learn that this diagnosticity depends on the set of alternative hypotheses being considered. The goal of this project has been two-fold. First, a specific system design has been developed to teach in this context. Second, this context has been used to empirically study the effectiveness of the underlying design concepts to support learning. In particular, an initial formative evaluation was performed in order to gain insights about the effectiveness of this software