Learning technologies to foster critical reasoning

Within the Vanderbilt-Northwestern-Texas-Harvard/MIT Engineering Research Center in Bioengineering Educational Technologies, (VaNTH ERC) several leaming technologies have been created to support and encourage the development and deployment of Web-based interactive environments that foster learning critical reasoning skills in engineering contexts. Two particular technologies are described briefly in this article: The Indie tools ("Indie" stands for investigate and decide). These tools are for authoring and delivering challenge-based scenarios where learners have to investigate a situation, perform (simulated) experiments, and use the resulting data to argue for and against possible hypotheses and courses of action. The SASK (for "Socratic ask") tools. These tools are for authoring and delivering question-driven Socratic dialogs to foster critical reflection by learners engaged in a problem-solving challenge. Unlike generic authoring tools such as Flash and DreamWeaver, which are often used to create educational Web sites and applications, these tools were designed from the ground up to support learning activities that educational research has found to be effective for long-term learning. Like the generic tools, however, these tools use only HTML, Javascript, and, on the server side, Java and XML, for maximum deployability.