The Next Generation Science Standards [1] expect students to master disciplinary core ideas, crosscutting concepts, and scientific practice. In prior work, we showed that students benefited from real time scaffolding of science practices such that students' inquiry competencies both improved over time and transferred to new science topics. The present study examines the robustness of adaptive scaffolding by evaluating students' inquiry performances at a very fine-grained level in order to investigate "what" aspects of inquiry are robust over time once scaffolding was removed. 108 middle school students in grade 6 used Inq-ITS and received adaptive scaffolding for three lab activities in the first inquiry topic they completed (i.e. Animal Cell); they then completed 10 activities without scaffolding across three new topics. Results showed that after removing scaffolding, student's inquiry performance generally improved with slight variations in performance across driving questions and over time. Overall, these findings suggest that adaptive scaffolding may support students' inquiry learning and transfer of inquiry practices over time and across topics.