COEXA: A Questioning Model based on Inquiry-based Learning and

Social Web

Claudia Pimentel, Isabela Gasparini and Avanilde Kemczinski

Santa Catarina State University (UDESC), Santa Catarina, Brazil

Keywords:

Inquiry-based Learning, Social Web, Exercises System.

Abstract:

Currently is seen the need of students develop various skills for good social life such as critical thinking.

Aiming to ﬁnd alternatives to these problem, this work introduces the COEXA model, supported by inquiry-

based learning and social web for educational environments. This model encourages the student to be more

active in the learning process by creating and answering questions and also interacting with other students.

For this, the fundamentals of the approaches were studied and the survey of related works was also performed.

This model can be applied in different educational environments, but for this work an instance of COEXA was

implemented in AdaptWeb

 (Adaptive Web based learning Environment), and to evaluate its applicability,

an experiment was accomplished with students. From this experiment, we collected the interaction data from

89 participants and their opinion were collected through a questionnaire survey. Analyzing the answers and

the data collected, it was possible to notice that students thought that the possibility of creating exercises to

keep their knowledge and interact with others is very interesting, but they had difﬁculty with managing time,

insecurity and doubts about the creation process.

1 INTRODUCTION

It is very important that children, youth and adults, to

participate in an integrated and effective way of life

in society, with the contribution of educational insti-

tutions (Berbel, 2011). Therefore, there is a need for

students to have a critical social background, because

the complexity of the different sectors of life has de-

manded the development of human resources to think,

feel and act in an increasingly broader and deeper way

(Berbel, 2011). Thus, it is necessary to look for new

strategies that make students develop different skills,

such as critical thinking.

A concept that can help students to increase par-

ticipation and develop skills, is Inquiry-Based Learn-

ing (IBL). IBL is an active, student-centered approach

where the learning is stimulated by investigation and

is based on a knowledge building process (Spronken-

Smith and Walker, 2010). There are several categories

of Inquiry-Based Learning, such as the Structured In-

quiry, where teachers establish a problem or a subject

and an outline for students to address, the Guided In-

quiry, where teachers provide questions to stimulate

students in their investigations, and the Open Inquiry,

where students act as scientists, asking questions, de-

signing and conducting investigations, and communi-

cating their results (Banchi and Bell, 2008).

For students, the results of the learning process

with the application of Inquiry-Based Learning in-

clude the development of critical thinking, the ability

to conduct research, intellectual growth and maturity

(Lee, 2004).

Another paradigm that can be used in the

teaching-learning process is the Social Web, which is

represented by a class of web sites and applications

in which user participation is the primary driver of

value. (Gruber, 2008). The Social Web is in the new

classes of web applications, as an example of these

applications there are Collaborative Systems and So-

cial Software, which are web-based, allow the interac-

tion and sharing of data between its users and enable

communication between groups of people (Machado

and Tijiboy, 2005). In the educational context, the So-

cial Web allows students to share knowledge in Vir-

tual Learning Environments, without depending on

the teacher as the only and primarily source of con-

tent.

This work aims to present a questioning model,

supported by Inquiry-Based Learning and the Social

Web. The COEXA model aims to develop skills, such

as critical thinking and social interaction.

Based on this model, an exercise tool was devel-

Pimentel, C., Gasparini, I. and Kemczinski, A.

COEXA: A Questioning Model based on Inquiry-based Learning and Social Web.

DOI: 10.5220/0010456500860094

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2021) - Volume 2, pages 86-94

ISBN: 978-989-758-502-9

oped and was included in AdaptWeb

(Adaptive Web

based learning Environment), a Virtual Learning En-

vironment, and an experiment was carried out from a

course of algorithms, which allowed the analysis of

results from an instance of the COEXA model in a

real context.

This paper presents the COEXA model and its ap-

plication through this experiment. In section 2 the

concepts used in the creation of the model are pre-

sented, section 3 presents the COEXA model, section

4 presents the implemented tool in AdaptWeb

, sec-

tion 5 reports the experiment carried out and section

6 presents the conclusions of this paper.

2 CONCEPTS

To understand how COEXA works, it is important

to understand the two main concepts on which it is

based and how they work together. Section 2.1 de-

tails Inquiry-Based Learning and section 2.2 presents

the Social Web concepts, beneﬁts and ways of use.

2.1 Inquiry-based Learning

Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) is an active, student-

centered approach, where learning is stimulated by

research and based on a knowledge building process

(Spronken-Smith and Walker, 2010). This pedagogi-

cal approach involves students actively in a process of

building knowledge through the generation of ques-

tions (Wu and Wu, 2018). IBL aims to involve stu-

dents in a scientiﬁc discovery process, emphasizing

active participation and the student’s responsibility to

discover new knowledge (Pedaste et al., 2015). It

is an approach that enables learners to draw connec-

tions between curricular content and real world situ-

ations in order to attain a broad perspective to solve

complex problems and foster critical thinking (Ker-

ven et al., 2017). Thus, IBL can be seen as similar

to research and as a way to integrate research and ed-

ucation, where students and teachers are in search of

knowledge (Spronken-Smith and Walker, 2010).

There are several ways to divide IBL into its lev-

els of investigation, but according to Banchi and Bell

(2008) it is divided into four levels, that are deﬁned

by the amount of information and guidance that the

teacher provides to students, as can be seen in Figure

1 and described:

• Conﬁrmation Inquiry: It is the ﬁrst level of IBL,

students receive the question, the method and the

results, it is useful when the teacher’s objective is

to reinforce an idea previously introduced or for

students to practice a speciﬁc phase of research,

such as collecting data (Banchi and Bell, 2008);

• Structured Inquiry: In the second level, the

question and method are still provided by the

teacher, however, students ﬁnd the result sup-

ported by the evidence that they received (Banchi

and Bell, 2008);

• Guided Inquiry: The third level, the teacher pro-

vides students only the research question and stu-

dents use the method to test their question and so-

lutions (Banchi and Bell, 2008);

• Open Inquiry: It is the highest level of inquiry,

students have the opportunity to act as scien-

tists, asking questions, designing and conducting

investigations, and communicating their results

(Banchi and Bell, 2008).

Figure 1: Levels of Inquiry (Banchi and Bell, 2008).

Figure 1 shows that the higher the IBL level, the

less information is provided by the teacher and the

greater the student’s autonomy. The levels are not

evaluated as one better than the other, they can even

be worked in parallel, for this reason the COEXA

model covers all levels of inquiry.

2.2 Social Web

The Social Web indicates a paradigm shift from a

machine-centered view of the Web towards a more

user or community-centered view (Piao, 2016). More

than interconnecting documents, pages or resources,

the Social Web connects people, organizations and

concepts (Pereira et al., 2010a). It is represented by a

class of websites and applications in which user par-

ticipation is the main factor (Gruber, 2008).

This paradigm is also revealed in the develop-

ment and growth of a new class of web applications,

such as Social Software, which is web-based and al-

lows interaction and data sharing between its users

and allow communication between people and groups

(Machado and Tijiboy, 2005).

Social software is a concept that work as social

mediator and supports the creation of networks of re-

lationships through spaces where the users can join

people in their relationship circle, meet other peo-

ple who share the same interests and discuss different

COEXA: A Questioning Model based on Inquiry-based Learning and Social Web

topics, building different links (Machado and Tijiboy,

2005). On social software, users interact, communi-

cate, create, share and organize content, demonstrat-

ing the opportunities and knowledge that can be gen-

erated by working together and interacting with peo-

ple (Pereira et al., 2010a).

To help in the deﬁnition and development of social

software, frameworks can be used, such as the Hon-

eycomb Framework, that is represented by the Figure

Figure 2: Honeycomb Framework (Smith, 2007).

The Honeycomb Framework was proposed by

Smith (2007) and has seven combs. Theses combs

represent the main aspects of Social Software, which

are (Smith, 2007):

• Identity: it is a unique identiﬁer of a user in the

system, a way of representing elements of a per-

son’s personality and individuality. An example is

a user proﬁle;

• Presence: related to the resources that let you

know if a certain person is online, sharing the

same environment at the same time;

• Relationships: it is a way to determine how users

of the system relate and are related to other users,

like friends or followers ;

• Reputation: it is a way of knowing how the user

is seen in the system, it can be a collective opin-

ion of other users or a statistical measure of the

system

• Groups: it is the possibility to form communi-

ties of users who share common interests, ideas

or opinions;

• Conversation: related to the resources for com-

munication between users, these resources can

promote both synchronous and asynchronous

communication;

• Sharing: refers to the possibility of sharing items

that are meaningful and important to users, such

as photos, documents and music.

The comb Identity appears at the center of the

framework because it is the most basic requirement of

any social software (Smith, 2007). It is important to

note that not all systems that use the Social Software

concept implement all the honeycombs presented and

the intensity of the use of each element in the systems

can vary. In general these systems implement three or

more elements of the framework, but ends up focus-

ing on one or two of them (Pereira et al., 2010b).

3 COEXA

COEXA is a questioning model to be applied in edu-

cational environments. Its proposal is to unite con-

cepts to students learning become more active and

consequently that he/she feels responsible for his/her

learning and develops different skills, such as critical

thinking.

To achieve the objectives, the IBL and social web

are joined in a questioning model. The ﬂow of ques-

tioning model is represented by the Figure 3. In

the ﬁgure are the principals actions proposed by the

model and each action have a tag to show what con-

cept it was based, IBL to inquiry-based learning and

SW to social web.

The model proposes that teacher manage all the

actions carried out by the students and interferes when

he/she perceives the need. Teacher can create ques-

tions to students, manage the interaction and inter-

act with them when needed. The students can create

questions to share with their classmates, and also stu-

dents can answer, evaluate, give feedback and report

questions. When a question is reported is necessary

to be reviewed and the model suggests that other stu-

dents do this when selected based on their reputation

on the course environment.

The main point of COEXA are the questions, they

are used to create more interaction between class-

mates, making them exchange experiences through

feedback, evaluations and even reports. The purpose

of creating and sharing questions is also to student re-

search about the content provided by the teacher and

that consequently ﬁx concepts and become more ac-

tive in the learning process.

CSEDU 2021 - 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

Figure 3: COEXA model ﬂow.

4 TOOL

To see how the model works in a real context, an

instance of the model was developed, which con-

sists of the implementation of an exercise system in

AdaptWeb

, and for the implementation of the tool

it was necessary to adapt it to the environment.

AdaptWeb

 is an educational environment,

which can be used by teachers, to provide content,

exercises, examples and tests of their subjects, and by

students who are registered in the subjects and want

to access the materials provided by the teacher.

To present the tool implemented this section will

be divided into the student’s view and the teacher’s

view.

4.1 Student’s View

In the exercise system implemented, the main func-

tionality is the creation of exercises by students. For

this reason, the ﬁrst step was to create a menu item

that could be identiﬁed throughout the online class-

room environment, leaving the creation of exercises

easy to access and view, as can be seen in the Figure

4. As the system was used by people with Portuguese’

mother tongue, the ﬁgures of the exercise system are

in Portuguese.

From the menu item, the form for creating ex-

ercises has been added. In this form students must

choose the type of question, its statement, the alterna-

tives, including quantity and which are correct, and

which topic of the subject this question should be

linked to. The form can be viewed in Figure 5.

When a student creates a question, it will auto-

matically be available to classmates on the same ex-

ercise listing page that previously existed in the en-

vironment. There is a highlight in the list to identify

which exercises are created by the teacher and which

are the exercises created by students. We chose auto-

matic inclusion of the exercises to avoid overloading

the teacher, in case he/she had to review all the ques-

tions. The list of all exercises can be seen in Figure

When a student answers a question created by one

of his classmates, he/she will have the option of eval-

uating the question with ”like” or ”dislike” and he/she

will also be able to report an error, as can be seen in

Figure 7. In this case, the teacher will be immediately

notiﬁed and able to correct the issue.

When the student decides to report an error of a

question he is directed to a form and he can list the

problem of the exercise. It was decided to leave pre-

COEXA: A Questioning Model based on Inquiry-based Learning and Social Web

Figure 4: Menu item for creating exercises.

Figure 5: Form for creating exercises.

Figure 6: List of exercises.

Figure 7: Exercise preview answered.

deﬁned options and a free ﬁeld for the student to be

able to report what happened in details. Another deci-

sion made was that when a student reports an error in

a question, it will be omitted for other students until

the teacher reviews and corrects it.

From the functionalities added to the student,

functionalities were developed for the teacher to man-

age what the students are doing in the exercise system,

this is stated in details below.

4.2 Teacher’s View

The ﬁrst feature created for the teacher was a menu

item that redirected him to choose which of his sub-

jects he wants to see the questions created by the stu-

dents. If the teacher chooses the ”manage questions”

option, he/she is directed to a list that shows all the

questions created by students in the subject, as shown

in Figure 8. In this list, the teacher has the option to

delete or edit a question and he is able to see informa-

tion like the number of ”likes” and ”dislikes” and the

question creator.

If the teacher chooses the ”reported questions” op-

tion, he/she is directed to a list that shows only the

questions reported by students. He/she also has the

option to edit or delete questions, if he decides to edit

a question, it will automatically be made available to

students again.

The last functionality implemented for the

teacher’s view, can be seen in Figure 9, is the form

for editing a question. The teacher can edit the state-

ment of the question, the description of the answers

and what are the correct alternatives.

In the next section is reported how the experiment

was carried out to evaluate the tool and the results ob-

tained.

5 EXPERIMENT

The experiment provided a course of Algorithms and

Programming Language on AdaptWeb

. The course

invitation was made from 25 to 28 August 2020

through social networks, emails to academics and

teachers and University’ website. Before the exper-

iment actually started, there was a pre-registration

CSEDU 2021 - 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

Figure 8: Visualization of all questions created by students.

Figure 9: Edition of a question created by a student.

stage, in which students had to ﬁll out a form with

personal data. The form got 504 answers from inter-

ested students.

It is also important to report that the role of teacher

was performed by one of the researchers, so it was

possible to be closer to users to assist them in the pro-

cess of creating exercises and also to manage the in-

teractions carried out within the platform.All content

was previously elaborate by the teachers of the sub-

ject.

On August 30, 2020, 504 interested people were

asked to register on AdaptWeb

, of these, only 266

students actually registered. The course took place

from August 31 to September 4, 2020, during this

period students had access to all the available con-

tent and could create and answer exercises, including

those created by their classmates.

During the course period, interactions were made

with students by email, encouraging them to access

the content and create exercises. The students did not

realize the possibility of creating exercises in the ﬁrst

days and the ﬁrst questions that were created by a stu-

dent were totally out of context, but these questions

were kept, in order to understand what the behavior of

the other students would be in relation to them. Some

students even liked the question, but during the course

all ended up being reported as error by other students.

Of the 266 students, 185 accessed at least one con-

tent, 36 created exercises and 11 reported exercises

created by their classmates. In total there were 78

exercises created by students and 25 reported. The

”like” and ”dislike” options was not popular with stu-

dents, only 50 questions were evaluated, none of them

received ”dislike”, the maximum positive evaluations

with ”like” that a question received was 11, but the

average was between 3 or 4 ”likes” for each evaluated

question.

On September 5, 2020 it was the test day, where

students were also able to answer a questionnaire sur-

vey about their participation, leaving their opinion

about the exercise system, in total 89 students an-

swered the questionnaire.

According to the analysis of the responses to the

questionnaire survey, it was possible to better un-

derstand the proﬁle of the students who completed

the course. It is interesting to highlight the diver-

sity among the participants, there were high school

and technical students, undergraduate and master stu-

COEXA: A Questioning Model based on Inquiry-based Learning and Social Web

dents. It is also interesting to note that the experi-

ment covered people from different areas, in addition

to technology participants, who had or will have con-

tact with programming languages, there were partici-

pants in areas such as gastronomy and history.

In the questionnaire, most questions were focused

on the exercise system and the course itself. The ﬁrst

question aimed to ﬁnd out what the students thought

of the course. Of the 89 respondents, 84 were satisﬁed

with the content and progress of the course, the other

5 reported that they expected more interactivity and

more detailed explanations and examples.

It was also asked if the student created questions

for the course, 40 students reported that they created

at least one exercise, it can be seen in Figure 10, but

according to the analyzes made on the platform, 36

students who answered the form really created ques-

tions by the exercise system.

Figure 10: Representation of students that reported creating

exercises.

Soon after, students were asked to justify why they

created or not exercises in the subject. Of the 89, 24

students answered that they did not create exercises

due to lack of time and time management, 34 students

created exercises and the main reasons commented

were: to test the knowledge acquired, contribute to

the course, participate, interact and contribute with

classmates and study the concepts, the others 31 stu-

dents created it because they thought it was manda-

tory, others did not understand how the creation pro-

cess worked, some were insecure with the idea of cre-

ating and sharing exercises with their classmates.

The next question on the form was to understand

what the students thought of the dynamics of answer-

ing questions from their classmates, 66 students liked

the initiative, commented that it is good to increase

the number of questions in the course, interesting to

have an exchange of experience among students and

there are questions from people who are at the same

time and level of learning. The remaining 23 reported

that they do not believe that the option is interest-

ing because the questions are created by students and

without a teacher review, they could be poorly for-

mulated, confusing and contain errors. It is also in-

teresting to report that of the 78 questions created by

students, only 30 were answered by at least one user,

it can be seen in Figure 11.

Figure 11: Representation of questions answered by at least

one user.

Regarding the importance of being able to report

questions created by classmates, 81 students replied

that they think this possibility is important, justifying

that wrong questions could harm someone in learn-

ing and motivation, is important to maintain the con-

sistency of the course and also that the reporting of

questions can help the creators of the question to im-

prove their knowledge.

When asked the students if they thought it interest-

ing to be able to evaluate their classmates’ questions,

the majority with 89.9% answered yes, it can be seen

in Figure 12, but in the exercise system no question

was evaluated with ”dislike” and of all the questions

created, just 50 were evaluated.

Figure 12: Representation of students that thought it is in-

teresting to evaluate their classmates’ questions.

Students were also asked what they liked best

about creating the exercises. It was mentioned that

they liked to see it as a challenge, to have freedom

to choose the type of question and the topic of the

subject, to be able to contribute with the course, the

possibility of interaction with classmates and to be a

new way of studying.

CSEDU 2021 - 13th International Conference on Computer Supported Education

Finally, students were asked for suggestions to im-

prove the process of creating exercises on the plat-

form, the ideas were: upload ﬁles and images to the

questions, use a mark-down statement to facilitate the

elaboration of the questions, the possibility for stu-

dents to edit their questions, help from the teacher

in this process, possibility to create essay questions,

promote more interaction between students, chat to

exchange ideas with the question creator, make the

option to create questions more visible and intuitive

on the platform and there were also some suggestions

for exchange the platform to increase the usability and

responsiveness.

6 CONCLUSIONS

The COEXA model focuses on increasing student in-

teraction during the use of educational environments

through questioning and consequently develop skills

such as critical thinking and responsibility for their

own learning. Therefore, its main proposal is to allow

students to create their own questions and to answer

and evaluate the questions of their colleagues.

Based on the model, a tool was developed in

AdaptWeb

, where the creation of questions by the

students and the management of the exercise system

by the teacher was implemented, the students also has

the possibility to answer, evaluate and report the ques-

tions of their classmates.

After the tool created, an experiment was carried

out, and analyzing the results it was possible to no-

tice, based on the responses to the questionnaire sur-

vey, that the students thought it is interesting to be

able to create exercises to test their knowledge and

interact with others, but they had difﬁculty with time

management, insecurity and doubts about the creation

process. Based on the results obtained, it is believed

that the results could have been better if the experi-

ment had been carried out over a longer course, be-

cause the course of the experiment last just ﬁve days,

so that students would have more time to dedicate to

the exercise system, and not just focus on the content

provided.

As future work it is suggested the use of the CO-

EXA model combined with other techniques to sup-

port learning such as learning analytics and gamiﬁ-

cation, and the implementation of other elements of

the model in the tool, especially the social elements,

because as a suggestion many students reported that

they would like to interact more with their class.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank the Coordenac¸

de Aperfeic¸oamento de Pessoal de N

ıvel Superior

– Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001 and the

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cient

ıﬁco

e Tecnol

ogico - Brasil, Conselho Nacional de De-

senvolvimento Cient

ıﬁco e Tecnol

ogico(CNPq) grant

308395/2020-4, FAPESC (public call FAPESC/CNPq

No. 06/2016 support the infrastructure of CTI for

young researchers, project T.O. No.2017TR1755 -

Ambientes Inteligentes Educacionais com Integrac¸

de T

ecnicas de Learning Analytics e de Gamicac¸

ao),

and FAPESC/UDESC n

04/2018 – Apoio

a In-

fraestrutura para Grupos de Pesquisa da UDESC,

deﬁnido no

ambito do Acordo do Cooperac¸

ao T

ecnica

e Financeira - T.O N

2019TR585.

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