Using Enquire Within® as a self interviewing tool to aid the learning and teaching objective information to compare and contrast different countries in terms of their economic development, infrastructure, and skill base

This shows one of the early dialog boxes in a session where the user is comparing and contrasting different countries: Australia, South Africa, Thailand, United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Malawi, Japan, and New Zealand, in terms of their economic development, infrastructure, and skill base.

In this case, the class teacher set up the session, whose purpose is to explore and develop the students’ learning in the field of economic geography. She can leave the students alone while they develop their sessions, making herself available when anyone needs clarification. For the students, the experience is interesting and challenging because they know that they’re working with their own personal data, as if they’ve set themselves their own quiz. And for the teacher, the experience is rewarding because she knows that all her interventions are properly timed:

The Add Construct screen looks like this:

NOTE: Screen shots on this page relate to an early version of Enquire Within but adequately show the principles involved.

[Adding constructs]

and the first six constructs the user produced were:

[Initial constructs]

And the resulting dendritic analysis at this stage looks like:

[Construct analysis screen]

At this stage, the differentiation process and/or visual examination of the Grid will reveal where and how the user’s knowledge base needs to be extended or challenged further. For example, Enquire Within will ask the user whether elements 7 and 8 (in this case, the USA and the UK) are really so similar that they should be correlated at the 98% level – and if not, to please give a construct which will ‘split’ the two. Or looking at the constructs, the close correlation between constructs 2 and 3 suggests that the user sees countries which depend strongly on primary products as having little impact on the rest of the works, and countries which are less dependent on primary products as having a greater impact on the rest of the world – which prompts the user to give an element which will ‘split’ the two constructs. So the student is always working at the places in their knowledge base which need more clarification, making the learning more personalised and cost-effective. And of course there are many variations on this process – for example, the teacher could have set up the session as a task for a small group, which means that the group will negotiate shared meanings as they go through the process.

There are virtually no limits to this process - the example here is small enough to fit on a page, but most Grids are much bigger and more complex - for example, an economist engaged in scenario planning has worked with a 72 x 75 Grid and by definition, nothing in it is redundant.

Back to: Some Enquire Within Sample Sessions

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Back to: Some Enquire Within Sample Sessions

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