Inquire Biology: A Textbook that Answers Questions

Inquire Biology is a prototype of a new kind of intelligent textbook -- one that answers students' questions, engages their interest, and improves their understanding. Inquire Biology provides unique capabilities via a knowledge representation that captures conceptual knowledge from the textbook and uses inference procedures to answer students' questions. In an initial controlled experiment, community college students using the Inquire Biology prototype outperformed students using either a hardcopy or conventional E-book version of the same biology textbook. While additional research is needed to fully develop Inquire Biology, the initial prototype clearly demonstrates the promise of applying knowledge representation and question-answering technology to electronic textbooks.