Abstract in Englisch:

Engaging students in inquiry learning without sufficient support often results in poor learning performance. Students need to be su pported to benefit from inquiry learning activities (de Jong, 2006; Hmelo - Silver, Duncan, & Chinn, 2007). The main goal of this work is to investigate the effects of supporting regulation using prompts on learning gain and scientific reasoning in a compute r - based inquiry learning context offering advanced inquiry support. Does learning gain depend on the extent of inquiry support? Are regulation prompts (e.g. “Compare your result graph with your hypothesis. Are they different from each other?”) superior in comparison to generic explanation prompts (e.g. “please explain”) with respect to knowledg e gain and scientific reasoning ? Do students benefit from those additional regulation prompts sustainably? Before these questions were addressed in two experimental s tudies, an exploratory study revealed problems to engage in (1) deliberate regulation and (2) a tendency to write descriptive explanations lacking scientific reasoning while running experiments in an inquiry cycle. The model - based environment FreeStyler (H oppe & Gassner, 2002) was adapted to guide a learner through the respective phases of an inquiry cycle and to offer prompts. Results of the main experimental study were able to confirm findings from the pilot study showing an advantage for the regulation g roup (students receiving regulation prompts) in comparison to the explanation group (students receiving explanation prompts only) with respect to knowledge gain. In addition, it was shown that the regulation group outperformed a basic inquiry group that se rved as a baseline receiving minimal support in terms of inquiry and no support with respect to explanation and regulation. Moreover, the sustainability of this effect was demonstrated. It was shown that prompts are effective means leading to deeper proces sing and that explanation prompts should be augmented with regulation prompts. Findings suggest in general that in order to engage learners in inquiry learning, a balance between inquiry support, explanation support, and regulation support is needed.