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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Digital Education
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1503996
Inquiry Based Learning in Software Engineering Education: Exploring Students' Multiple Inquiry Levels in a Programming Course
Provisionally accepted
Sohaib Ahmed 1
Syed Ahmed Hassan Bukhari 1 Adnan Ahmad 2 Osama Rehman 1 Faizan Ahmad 3 Kamran Ahsan 4
Tze Wei Liew 5*- 1 Bahria University, Karachi, Karachi, Pakistan
- 2 COMSATS University Islamabad, Lahore Campus, Lahore, Punjab, Pakistan
- 3 Cardiff Metropolitan University, Cardiff, United Kingdom
- 4 Federal Urdu University of Arts, Science and Technology, Karachi, Pakistan
- 5 Faculty of Business, Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
Learning programming is becoming crucial nowadays for producing students with computational thinking and problem-solving skills in software engineering education. In recent years, educators and researchers are keen to use inquiry-based learning (IBL) as a pedagogical instructional approach for developing students' programming learning skills. IBL instructions can be provided to students through four inquiry levels: confirmation, structured, guided, and open. In the literature, most of the IBL applications follow only one form of inquiry level to explore observed phenomena. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore multiple inquiry levels in a programming course taught in a software engineering program. For this purpose, MILOS (Multiple Inquiry Levels Ontology-driven System) was developed using activity-oriented design method (AODM) tools. AODM is an investigative framework to identify the significant elements of the underlying human activity. In MILOS, students were involved in different inquiry levels to answer the questions given related to the programming concepts taught in their classes. Further, MILOS was evaluated with 54 first-year software engineering students through an experiment. For the comparison, Sololearn, an online programming application, was tested with 55 first-year software engineering students. Both these applications were evaluated through Micro and Meso levels of the M3 evaluation framework. The Micro-level investigates usability aspects of MILOS and Sololearn while the Meso level explores the learners' performances using these applications. Overall, the results were promising as students outperformed using MILOS as compared to Sololearn application.
Keywords: inquiry based learning1, inquiry levels2, computer programming skills3, software engineering4, higher education5
Received: 30 Sep 2024; Accepted: 11 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Ahmed, Bukhari, Ahmad, Rehman, Ahmad, Ahsan and Liew. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Tze Wei Liew, Faculty of Business, Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Selangor Darul Ehsan, Malaysia
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.