CHARACTER-EYES

Story-driven Inquiry from a Character’s Viewpoint

Annika Wolff, Paul Mulholland and Zdenek Zdrahal

Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, Walton Hall, MK7 6AA, Milton Keynes, U.K.

Keywords: Narrative, Inquiry-based learning.

Abstract: Inquiry-based learning encourages students to pose questions, find and interpret multiple pieces of evidence

and to present conclusions in a coherent presentation. The goal of this research is to demonstrate that

narrative and story can support inquiry learning on a number of different levels. Characters who undertake

familiar inquiry processes, such as a detective or an investigative journalist, can act as a focus around which

an inquiry task can be conducted and a story can be constructed. These characters are intended to support a

learner by helping them to understand the sorts of activities they may need to do in their own inquiry. More

functional aspects of narrative can also underpin the process of the inquiry and assist a learner in

understanding important relationships between facts. Finally, parallels between narrative structure and an

inquiry process can be exploited to support a learner through the different stages of inquiry and provide help

in producing the output and constructing a story, based on the conclusions of the task.

1 INTRODUCTION

Since an inquiry-based learning approach has been

shown to increase engagement and have a positive

effect on student learning, inquiry processes have

become more common-place in the classroom. How

teachers choose to interpret the inquiry process can

vary, but essentially students are required to

approach a task through an active phase of evidence

gathering, which is interpreted in view of the initial

learning goal as well as incorporating additional

questions or issues which arise during the process of

inquiry.

In a truly open inquiry, the student will decide

their own topic of investigation and undertake it

entirely by themselves. But choosing a topic,

selecting a driving question (Wallace et al., 1998)

with a suitable scope and then locating and

interpreting appropriate sources are skills that most

students must first learn. Students who are generally

unfamiliar with an inquiry-based approach may not

be used to dealing with multiple information sources

and may have difficulty dealing with the amount of

data they are generating and in relating this to their

inquiry question. They might wonder what to do

when they come across information which is at a

tangent to their main goal, suggests further avenues

for research, or is contradictory to what they thought

they would find. Novice inquiry learners require

help in developing these skills of inquiry (Kirschner,

Sweller & Clark, 2006; Mayer, 2004). Therefore,

most teachers use a form of guided inquiry which

provides a framework and some instructions for

conducting the investigation (Conole et al., 2008;

Dillenbourg and Jermann, 2007; Martin-Hansen,

2002). In many cases, teachers also provide the set

of resources from which the student can complete

the task.

This research proposes that principles of

narrative can be used to guide a student’s inquiry,

help to keep them on track in completing the task

and aid the production of a coherent narrative

output. Since people are primed to remember

narratively structured experiences more easily than

those which don’t conform to an expected form of

narrative (Thorndyke, 1977, Wolff et al., 2007), the

use of narrative should create a memorable tool that

can be easily recalled and reapplied to new inquiry

scenarios.

2 NARRATIVE SUPPORT FOR

LEARNING

It is generally accepted that people are narrative-

402

Wolff A., Mulholland P. and Zdrahal Z..

CHARACTER-EYES - Story-driven Inquiry from a Character’s Viewpoint.

DOI: 10.5220/0003339604020407

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2011), pages 402-407

ISBN: 978-989-8425-49-2

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

thinkers. Stories have a property of coherence which

makes them easier to understand than events which

are conveyed in a seemingly unrelated fashion.

Thus, organising facts and events into stories and

using this to support learning is a well studied topic

of research. Narrative tools to support learning take

different forms. Some systems attempt to immerse a

learner in a virtual story world, where they become a

character carrying out important parts of a dramatic

plot (Mott et al., 2006; Thomas and Young 2007).

This approach requires that the learner is fairly

constrained in their possible actions, if they are not

to stray outside the prescribed narrative boundaries.

Other tools take a more subtle approach, using

narrative principles to organise content, or to convey

important information in an easily digestible format,

whilst allowing the learner more agency over their

actions (Plowman et al., 1999). These systems tend

to be less dramatic or character-based. There are

advantages and disadvantages to both types of

approach. A dramatic plot can be more engaging,

particularly if it employs narrative effects such as

rising tension and if the characters are well chosen.

Constraining the plot also makes it easier to

maintain coherence. However, the lack of control

can be frustrating for a user and if the chosen story

does not appeal to them, or if it doesn’t gel with the

topic of inquiry, then this diminishes engagement.

Conversely, the greater control the user has, the less

dramatic elements can be used to good effect and the

harder it is to maintain a coherent story-line. But,

having the freedom to be active in the task is

beneficial for learning. This research will endeavour

to find a balance where it is possible to combine the

best parts of both types of narrative approach to

support inquiry-based learning tasks.

3 NARRATIVE AND INQUIRY

The basic structure of an inquiry process has many

similarities to the basic structure of a narrative, as

demonstrated in the following table. The narrative

version is presented from the perspective of an

author whilst the inquiry is from the perspective of a

learner conducting an open inquiry:

Table 1: Parallels between narrative and inquiry.

Narrative Inquiry

Theme: Introduce the

theme and the main

characters.

Topic: Introduce the topic

and background to the

investigation.

Conflict: Pose a

conflict for the main

character to overcome.

Learning goal: Pose a

driving question to

investigate and provide an

answer to.

Resolution attempts:

Outline what the

character does to

overcome the

conflicts, introduce at

least one further

obstacle that the

character must

overcome before the

final resolution of the

original conflict

occurs.

Evidence gathering:

Gather and interpret

evidence to see how it

addresses the learning

goal. A good inquiry

question should prompt

some further, more

detailed questions, before

the more complex learning

goal is achieved.

Epilogue: Bring the

narrative to a close, tie

up loose ends.

Conclusions: when all

questions are answered,

what are the main

conclusions with respect to

the learning goal?

Elaborating on the parallels between narrative

and inquiry, the person who is conducting the

inquiry can be thought of as a character,

participating in events which can ultimately be

related as a story. This story offers a particular route

across a set of related facts and events that constitute

the narrative space. The events occur in a temporal

order, although they are not always presented in that

order (e.g. flashbacks and flashforwards). Readers of

such narratives will try to mentally reconstruct a

timeline in order to understand how events are

causally related. If an author fails to indicate

temporal disruptions, then the plot will lose

coherence (Genette, 1980; Kafalenos, 2006). Also,

stories that are told from the same set of narrative

facts may differ in perspective, outcome or even

mode of presentation. Facts may be omitted or

included in accordance with the focus of a specific

story – or, for inquiry, with respect to the learning

goal and the stated questions. Therefore, a narrative

space may yield a number of different story

interpretations.

These sorts of differences can be illustrated

using the example of historical inquiry.

Traditionally, students have learned history by rote

learning of facts from pre-constructed stories, which

generally convey just one particular perspective of

the historian who created it. More recently, history

CHARACTER-EYES - Story-driven Inquiry from a Character's Viewpoint

403

has been taught through inquiry, using a range of

materials including some primary sources. Students

are encouraged to construct their own stories using

these sources. They thereby come to understand that

historical stories are based on an interpretation of the

available evidence and that multiple interpretations

may exist, especially where there is conflicting

information. Some tools exist to support historical

inquiry in the classroom. These generally provide a

framework for a guided inquiry, but in a historical

context (e.g. GATHER by Anderson-Inman and

Kessinger, 2000; SCIM-C by Hicks et al., 2004

Two related approach which attempt to make the

narrative link much stronger, but in a subtly different

way, are HSI - Historical Scene Investigation

(Hofer, Swan and Whitaker, 2004) and The Mystery

of Sam Smiley (Hicks et al., 2004

). In these

approaches, the task is set in the context of an actual

investigation. In Sam Smiley, the student

investigates a fictional disappearance of a character

called Sam Smiley. They undertake an inquiry

process, but they are in the role of a detective

investigating the case. All of the resources are

themed, so instead of being data sources, they are

witness statements, a list of physical evidence from

the scene etc. This task is intended to be an

introduction to teach students about inquiry. Related

to this is HSI, where the students look at actual

history sources to answer a real inquiry question, but

the task is themed to be like a crime scene, so that

the students can easily relate the processes to

something they already understand. The common

theme is using narrative to both engage learners and

to help them understand some of the actual inquiry

processes that they will need to undertake by

parallels to the common activities of the detective

character.

4 PROPOSED NARRATIVE

SUPPORT FOR INQUIRY

LEARNING

The narrative support proposed in this paper is based

on similar principles. It is aimed at helping the

learner to understand an inquiry task in the context

of a known story schema. Learner’s must choose a

character for the task, from a selection of detective,

investigative journalist, scientist or archaeologist.

Each character-type specialises in slightly different

types of inquiry, so the choice may be influenced by

the attributes of the task. Specifically, the character

choice and the driving question must be consistent

so a detective might tackle solving a ‘mystery’

which involves collecting and analysing evidence

within a fairly small time-frame, an investigative

journalist might try to offer a new perspective on an

old story by looking for new evidence or

information that conflicts with an accepted

viewpoint, a scientist would deal with data driven

tasks and an archaeologist might try to answer

questions that involve longer periods of time and

have an emphasis on location. The learner then

‘becomes’ their character, undertaking the inquiry

and creating an appropriate output, e.g. a detective

produces case-notes, a journalist creates a news

report, a scientist outputs a scientific paper and an

archaeologist curates a display of artefacts based on

their findings. The learner isn’t overly constrained

by the story or their character with regards to the

types of activities they can undertake as part of the

inquiry, they are free to choose what they want to

do. The story is, at this level, meant as a prop to help

the learner and to keep them on track with the

process, through analogy to the pre-supplied story-

schema.

In the next stage of the inquiry process, the

learner will undertake a generally iterative process

of browsing resources, evidence gathering and

reflecting on progress towards answering the inquiry

question. During this process the learner should be

able to effectively discover, from the available

resources, the set of events that can ultimately be

used to create a chain of reasoning, in the form of a

coherent narrative, to support their eventual

conclusion. A learner might begin this process by

first specifying some more focused questions to

drive their research and then looking for this

information amongst the resources. Alternatively,

they may immediately begin looking at the

resources, using only information from the driving

question as guidance on what to look for, and then

adding further questions as they arise during inquiry.

In either case, it is likely that the relevant events and

information will be encountered out of sequence and

that the learner must somehow restructure the

information in order to firstly generate hypotheses

and then to create their narrative output.

In this stage, learners will be assisted in making

summaries of the resources, by way of tagging

(under five categories: event, people, place, objects

and time, which are informed by narrative

principles) and through the creation of surrogates

(either thumbnail images or short text descriptions)

that can be more easily manipulated. A resource

summary should describe either a single event or

else some potentially relevant background

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information. Therefore, a resource may be linked to

more than one resource summary. These summaries

provide a more manageable unit from which the

learner can create narrative. The process of building

the narrative involves firstly grouping the surrogates

- using the summaries as a guide - according to

either low-level features (such as people, place) or

thematic links and then organising them in a way

which will assist the learner in identifying important

relationships between them. In narrative, an

important sequence is temporal order, with causal

links in between events on the timeline (or to

background information). To this end, the learner

will be assisted in constructing a timeline of events,

within which they can visualise common patterns

amongst events and also to recognise where

information is missing or contradictory. This

information can be automatically visualised to the

learner, based on the tags they have supplied to each

resource summary. Examples include:

• Inconsistency: a person or object is indicated

as being in two different places at the same

time; the same event is shown to occur at two

different times.

• Pattern: the same sort of event was

happening in different places/at different

times; a similar set of objects were found at

place A, time A as at place B, time B – is

there a connection? E.g.in archaeology, if

century household objects are found at

location A and 16

century ones are found at

location B, which is close-by, might there

have been an event which would have caused

a community to move from one place to

another at that time?

• Missing Information: if the same event is

happening in different places, is there a

common trigger that can be found, e.g. an

event that occurred in the same time-frame

prior to each of them? Might one have

influenced the other?

Visualisations may help a learner answer one or

more inquiry questions, or else may prompt a further

inquiry question to be added, e.g. to find missing

information, resolve conflicting information or open

up a new avenue of inquiry. Since it is not always

possible to find missing information or conclusively

resolve conflicting accounts, the learner (in the form

of the character doing the inquiry) must be prompted

to speculate some reasonable explanations to fill the

gaps so that the narrative can be completed

coherently. Another measure that can be used to

indicate coherence is that the learner has answered

all questions. But the learner must also recognise

when to prune questions which lead away from the

learning goal. In order to drive the inquiry, the

student will be prompted to consider what questions

remain unanswered and how to answer them, as well

as whether the remaining questions are still valid.

This whole process of posing questions,

browsing and tagging resources, grouping and

sequencing resource surrogates and revisiting the

questions is an iterative one. The grouping and

linking may start out tentative, but subsequent

revisions and the addition of new information

should, over time, lead to a coherent description of

events and the relationships between them sufficient

for constructing the narrative response to the original

inquiry question.

The main focus for producing the narrative

output surrounds the questions and answers.

Students will be supported in organising all their

data around the questions, in adding new questions,

or in removing questions that lead off on tangents.

The driving question must have a related conclusion

in order to create the story and sub-questions should

also have answers if they are to be included in the

narrative. Students can organise their questions to

reflect the order in which they want to convey their

narrative. When they come to produce their output,

in whatever form it takes, the overall structure must

consist of the topic introduction (which may be

summarised from what was originally presented to

start the task), a statement of the learning goal and

all of the evidence (which is the questions and

answers created during the inquiry process) that will

support the conclusions.

Learners who are unsure of the story-schema, or

how it relates to an inquiry task, can choose

additional passive, or active, help. If they choose

active help they will undertake a tutorial task which

grounds the activity in a more standard story-setting.

So, the detective will solve a real detective task,

such as investigating a disappearance, or an

archaeologist will be piecing together evidence from

several excavation sites to decide who lived there

and what those sites were used for. Alternatively,

these tasks might be used by the teacher as a training

tool, prior to giving a real inquiry task. Passive help

is similar but instead of actively doing the task, the

learner is given examples of activities that their

chosen character might do at that stage of the

inquiry, e.g. “A detective would build up character

profiles and construct timelines to see when events

occurred” or “An archaeologist would try to find

multiple pieces of evidence to support their

conclusions”

CHARACTER-EYES - Story-driven Inquiry from a Character's Viewpoint

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Work has begun on implementing the interface,

using Drupal, through the development of four

distinct modules. These are:

1. Story Schema: Choosing and applying a story

schema. This story schema is then applied to

the inquiry interface and affects

presentational aspects and is also used to

provide learner help that is specific to the

types of tasks that the chosen character might

do.

2. Inquiry Questions: Handling the setting,

modifying and sequencing of questions and

subquestions as well as the learners

responses. The driving question should be

consistent with the character choice. This

module allows questions and subquestions to

be proposed, re-ordered and answered and for

resources and their associated tags and

comments to be linked. This module is where

the narrative is created out of the inquiry

process, as all of the information that is

collected during inquiry appears here in an

organised form. In the final narrative, the

learner can choose to show or hide elements,

or add in extra lines of text to improve the

narrative flow.

3. Resources: Tagging and summarising

resources and creating surrogates.

4. Visualisations: creating groupings from the

surrogates, sequencing them and identifying

relationships between them. This is both

learner-led and supported by reasoning

strategies applied to the resource data.

5 CONCLUSIONS

AND FUTURE WORK

This paper proposes that narrative can support

inquiry learning in two distinct ways. Firstly, by

providing a story framework within which the

processes of the inquiry can be more easily

understood and by using this schema to provide both

pre-task training and in-task assistance to the

learner. This framework, based on characters such as

detectives and journalists, is also intended to

increase engagement with the task. Secondly,

narrative can support the organisation of information

into coherent units that constitute the narrative space

from which stories can be constructed. Furthermore,

the similarities between the four stages of an inquiry

process and the four stages of a narrative can

provide a starting point for creating the story, by

indicating important narrative elements to include

(theme, conflict, resolution attempts and epilogue)

all of which have been created in some form through

the inquiry process.

Future work will involve implementing the core

narrative functionality and conducting studies to see

if narrative elements have a positive influence on

performance in an inquiry task.

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