In our society today, there are many big issues like climate change, biodiversity, and energy supply where good understanding of physics, biology and other environmental studies are required. The basis for understanding these complex phenomena is already laid at school, starting in primary education. Furthermore, digital development with the internet has found its way into school life. Compared to traditional textbooks used in schools the Internet offers an immense wealth of information, views, and reflections. According to current curricula in Europe like in Finland (see Finnish National Board of Education 2016), the students are expected to cope with the great amount of information and learn to find relevant information for learning purposes in schools. (Magliano et. al. 2017). Hence, it is important in science education both to learn scientific content like facts and concepts but also online inquiry skills (Goldman et.al., 2012). Online-inquiry involves skills such as finding and evaluating different sources, recognizing the main relevant ideas their relationships and connections from the different sources, and synthesizing knowledge from various sources (e.g., Frerejean et al. 2019). Learning these skills does not occur naturally but is often challenging and needs to be practiced in school already in primary education.
In this study we investigate how online inquiry skills can be facilitated by using a learning environment, Kidnet, which is designed to practice the whole cycle of online inquiry in a flexible way in an authentic classroom. During online inquiry student constructs different kinds of mental models (Rouet et al. 2017). First the student constructs a context model and perceives the context of the inquiry task, for example the topic and the functioning of the learning environment. Furthermore, the student constructs a task model and plans the strategy for example how to search, what sources are relevant, when to search more sources, how to write a synthesis etc. In an online science inquiry, the student has not only to learn science content, concepts and causal and temporal relations, but also skills. These skills are understanding the inquiry task, choosing search strategies, searching, and locating information, scanning and evaluating the information, finding and selecting the main ideas and synthesizing these ideas into a coherent model, and writing a synthesis (Brand-Gruwel et al. 2009). The KidNet environment comprises all phases of online inquiry from the task to writing a synthesis. It is a closed environment so that all actions made by the student are stored into a file, in the log data. In KidNEt environment there are precisely defined files relating to each task. Thus the log data can be analysed, for example, the sources, which the student used, and the main ideas, which the student copied into the personal clipboard to use them by writing the synthesis. 

 Furthermore, we used the approach of science capital (Archer et at. 2015) to describe students attitudes towards science, engagement with science-related activities, and access to science-related resources and opportunities. (Archer et al. 2015). In sum we aim to support students to gain a more comprehensive understanding of science topics, learn skills in digital environment and investigate attitudes towards science.

 Hence, this case study deals with the following research questions:  

 - How do students learn online inquiry skills by using digital learning environment KidNet?

- What kind of science capital students have

- How is students’ science capital is linked to online inquiry skills?

The case study was performed as an intervention using a pre- and a post-test design. The participants were 30 six-graders aged from 12 to 13 years from a primary school in an urban area of Finland. After a general introduction and online questionnaire for science capital the performance-oriented skill- test for online inquiry with KidNet was performed. The intervention was led by the teacher in five 90-minutes lessons. The topic in the intervention was “Animal Adaptation and challenges with the climate change”. Furthermore, online inquiry skills were systematically taught and practiced. There were three assignments concerning the topic in the KidNet. Log data was collected and analysed concerning, how many relevant sources the student detected, how many relevant main ideas the student had copied into the personal clipboard, and how many relevant ideas the student wrote in the synthesis. The science capital questionnaire consisted of 26 Likert scale items (1-5; 1= strongly agree to 5 = strongly disagree). Findings Our preliminary results indicate that students´ performance in finding relevant sources did not improve from pre-to post-test. However, students learned to detect more main ideas in the relevant sources statistically significantly (p = .03), from pre-test (M=4.4;SD=3.3) to post-test (M =6.3;SD = 3.1). Results concerning science attitudes revealed that students perceived their self-efficacy in science as neutral (M = 3, SD= ). The support from teachers to learn science was seen rather negative (M = 3.2; SD =. 8). A future career in science was not considered as a good possibility (M = 3.4; SD=.8), although a science qualifications in general was perceived as useful (M = 2.6; SD = .7). Parents seems to support this attitude to study for science qualification ( M = 2.7; SD=.7). Dependencies between the outcomes of the intervention and the factors of the science capital could not be found.

The case study has brought some interesting and pedagogically meaningful findings. The environment seems to be promising while it supports students to learn online inquiry skills. The science capital approach seems to fit well together with online inquiry with complex science topics. The questionnaire seems to work also in the Finnish context. However, the role of the teacher can be elaborated a little better in this context of primary education. Furthermore, it can be assumed that in online inquiry assignments attention should be paid to a more positive contextualisation. This can be achieved, for example, through an appropriate framework like a storyline to enhance the personal connection to the science topic. However, we have considered the small sample of our case study as a limitation. Furthermore, KidNet can be seen as a promising learning environment. However, the potential is far from exhausted especially regarding the analysis of the log file. Furthermore, the function of the clipboard to prepare the main ideas for the synthesis writing must offer more support. Finding the main ideas seems to be well supported, but the support for using the selected main ideas for writing the synthesis must be improved. One can think in the direction of concept maps, which KidNet can offer. In the primary education the solution should be a very simplified form of concept map. Furthermore, more process data from the log file as well as the synthesis can be analysed in other ways.

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