Can Middle School students engage in meaningful science inquiry? As the hi-ce group pursues a "science for all students" philosophy, Tool Soup is playing a vital part in answering that question. Based on our initial year of pilot testing in a Detroit middle school, the answer is yes! As national standards place increasing emphasis on deep understanding of scientific concepts and reasoning skills, developing "science inquiry" skills in young learners becomes a major goal of science instruction.

Tool Soup is an integrated suite of software tools that assist novice learners in pursuing significant science inquiry. Middle School students (6th and 7th grade) conduct in-depth investigations from their computer , instead of reading a static text book description of air quality in their city or state. A map interface (the Data Warehouse tool) allows students to sample data on an assortment of pollutants or weather variables at sites in their city or state, over a range of up to 20 years. Learners can sample multiple pollutants, and then visualize and compare data sets using graphs from the Viz-It tool. Relationships identified in the graphs can be used to answer questions such as "is the quality of air in my city improving over time?", or these relationships can be carried into a dynamic modeling tool called Model Builder (beta). Notes and reflections can be recorded in a basic text tool (Net Edit).

Tool Soup is similar to Symphony in many ways, but was delivered as a "low overhead" version of Symphony to support schools that could not meet the bandwidth requirements of Symphony. Tool Soup provides lightweight process scaffolding for the inquiry process and additional scaffolding within each tool. Scaffolding can be roughly defined as "that assistance provided to learners to allow them to perform tasks not previously within their abilities." By scaffolding the science inquiry process, we allow students to engage in broad and significant investigations, where they not only learn about basic relationships (such as the relationship of air temperature and ozone levels), but also develop increasing competence in the process of scientific inquiry. While Tool Soup does not contain the same degree of scaffolding, reflection, and artifact management as Symphony, it supports the central facets of science inquiry and makes possible dramatically different activities for learners.

During initial test of Tool Soup in a Detroit middle school, we have observed four groups of students (54 total). Students were able to effectively conduct inquiry on the topics of air and water quality, using
massive EPA data sets to answer questions like "is the quality of water in the Rouge River improving over the last 10 years?" These initial tests provided an exciting glimpse at the potential of these scaffolded integrated tool suites, as some groups of students went beyond the planned activities to investigate additional pollutant variables on their own. As we fully integrate Tool Soup into our curricula, and students use these tools over a longer time and for a variety of their own questions, we expect to see an increase in depth of student reasoning and ability to perform more complex tasks, (much in the same way that we did with the integration of Model Builder (beta).

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