BOX 9.3 The Use of ThinkerTools in Physics Instruction The ThinkerTools Inquiry Curriculum uses an innovative software tool that allows experimenters to perform physics experiments under a variety of conditions and compare the results with experiments performed with actual objects. The curriculum emphasizes a metacognitive approach to instruction (see Chapters 2, 3, and 4) by using an inquiry cycle that helps students see where they are in the inquiry process, plus processes called reflective assessment in which students reflect on their own and each others' inquiries.      Experiments conducted with typical seventh-, eighth-, and ninth-grade students in urban, public middle schools revealed that the software modeling tools made the difficult subject of physics understandable as well as interesting to a wide range of students. Students not only learned about physics, but also about processes of inquiry. We found that, regardless of their lower grade levels (7-9) and their lower pretest scores, students who had participated in ThinkerTools outperformed high school physics students (grades 11-12) on qualitative problems in which they were asked to apply the basic principles of Newtonian mechanics to real-world situations. In general, this inquiry-oriented, model-based, constructivist approach to science education appears to make science interesting and accessible to a wider range of students than is possible with traditional approaches (White and Fredericksen, 1998:90-91).