Supporting productive exploration in invention activities: Are simulations too challenging?

Studies show that invention activities, where students invent a general rule from provided resources before receiving direct instruction on the target topic, are particularly beneficial for learning outcomes. For most common implementations of invention activities, students are provided with instructor-designed contrasting cases with which to invent their rule. Alternatively, students could use an interactive simulation where they then have the agency to explore and collect observations on their own. While this provides a promising opportunity for developing more robust inquiry skills, it also introduces substantial challenges for the students that, in addition to learning about the domain, need to learn about expert ways of doing science. In this work, we compare different support structures that seek to mitigate these issues. Specifically, we incorporate a collaborative support structure and further provide students with either a short list of general rules to disprove or a list of important features that students are prompted to incorporate in their rule. We show that these support structures are not sufficient to make the exploration of students in our simulation-based invention activities as productive as with using contrasting cases.