Content recommendation in an inquiry-based learning environment

Inquiry-based learning is defined as an educational approach guided by the process of question making. It is seen as an active learning scheme in which knowledge is built through the development of experimental and analytical activities. This paper presents the expansion of the SMILE project (Stanford Mobile Inquiry Based Learning Environment), whose goal is to allow students to create and share questions and answers using mobile devices. A variation of the original SMILE project is presented here, in which teachers propose a research topic based on a triggering text. A text mining tool is then used to extract relevant terms and keywords from the students' writings in order to search the web for related contents. The items returned are then filtered to be recommended to the students, making them aware of the availability of different material that may complement their investigation. Experiment results involving 34 graduate and undergraduate students showed that they had a positive perception of their use of the tool in the development of the activity. Students gave the tool an average score of 8.24 in a scale of 0 to 10, and a score of 8.03 to the inquiry-based learning activity.