Inquiry in Science and Classrooms

Traditional approach to learning science was more focused on mastery of content and not enough on science as a way of thinking and an attitude of mind. John Dewey emphasized in 1909 a different perspective on science instruction.  Science is more than body of knowledge to be learned, there is a process or method to be learned.  During the 1950s and 1960s educator Joseph Schwab was an influential voice in establishing the view of science education.  In his view, teachers should present science as inquiry and that students should use inquiry to learn science subject matter. He urged the teachers to first have students work in laboratory before they introduce them to the formal explanations of scientific concepts. He proposed three different approaches to teachers in the science instruction in laboratory.  The most open approach, students ask questions, gather evidence, and propose scientific explanations based on their own investigation.
The National Science Education Standards ( NSES) are a set of guidelines for the science education established by National Research Council in 1996. The content of these standards is based on constructivist learning theory, distinguished by emphasis on building on what child already knows and understands.
Five essential features of inquiry teaching and learning are:
1. Learners are engaged by scientifically  oriented questions.  Those are the questions that are useful for the purpose of empirical investigation and lead to gathering and using data to develop explanations for scientific phenomena.  Children will pose questions that are relevant and lead  to experience based investigations of scientific concepts.
2. Learners give priority to evidence, which allows them to develop and evaluate explanations of scientific oriented questions. Students actually learn to make explanations of phenomena based on evidence obtained from observations and measurements and not on myths, personal beliefs, religious values, or superstition.
3. Learners formulate explanations from evidence to address scientifically oriented questions.
Scientific explanations are based on reason. They establish relationship between evidence and logical argument. Explanations must be consistent with experimental and observational evidence about nature.
4. Learners evaluate their explanations taking into account alternative explanations, particularly those reflecting scientific understanding. Students engage in dialogues, compare results, or check their results proposed by the teacher or instructional materials.
5. Learners communicate and justify their proposed explanations. Students share their explanations, provide others the opportunity to ask questions, examine evidence,  identify faulty reasoning and suggest alternative explanations if the evidence does not support their explanations.

These features of inquiry help introduce students to important aspects of science and at the same time help them develop deeper knowledge of particular science concepts and processes.

How would I try to apply inquiry as a method of teaching in science classroom?
As a teacher I should build on my students natural curiosity. I would ask students questions that lead them to critical thinking and investigation.  I would encourage students to ask questions, that lead them to activities that generate more questions about particular scientific phenomena. Students could plan and carry out the learning activities in order to find explanations to their questions. They would record information, sort it out and decide what is important.  Their observations and measurements they would be able to record  in journals, reports, graphs. They would listen, speak and read about learning activities with their peers. They could confer about their observations with classmates and me.  Students would give explanations of phenomena they were investigating based on their previous knowledge and the evidence they gathered from experiments. They could also gather information from other sources  ( organizations outside school, books, magazines, teacher, parents and other professionals). Groups of students would share their explanations  and try to distinguish between those that  support observations and evidence.  In the process of reevaluation of these explanation students would verify the connections they made between evidence, their previous scientific knowledge and the proposed explanations. As for the assessment I would apply ongoing assessment.  Once students begin to explore questions I would observe them during the activities, examine aspects of their work.  I would make an effort to judge each student's progress from where he/she started to where he/she have progressed.

Shifting from Activitymania

The authors of this article have surveyed and interviewed practicing and prospective teachers in order to explore classroom practices in different districts at the K-12 level. Often the science instruction in the elementary classroom is in the form of what authors call activitymania. Activitymania is approach to teaching elementary science that involves a collection of prepackaged, hour long, hands-on activities that are often disconnected to each other. Instead the authors advocate for an inquiry as a way of teaching science.  Inquiry is the process of searching for the patterns and relationships in the world around us.
With activitymania preparation of materials are teacher's responsibility while with inquiry they are used upon students' request and are both responsibility of teacher and the students. Inquiry takes different directions according to students' interests and questions related to the concept being studied.  The outcome of the activities in activitymania style of teaching are known by the teacher, published by text and most times known by students. In activitymania the hypothesis is already defined by the teacher prior to experimentation while in in inquiry it arises from students' questions and is based on their experiences. In activitymania students are passive participants. They follow prescribed procedures. When doing experiments they disregard results that do not match teacher's expectations.
Activitymania calls for immediate, product-oriented, right -answer assessments, whereas inquiry  supports long-term, process-oriented evaluations.
With inquiry as a teaching method, teachers develop rubrics that evaluate different processes of learning in his/her classroom.
In order to me to make a shift from activitymania to inquiry as a way of teaching science, I would have to define conceptual goals and the relationships  to students' lived and interest before I select classroom activities. I should ask my students questions to determine their experiences and possible questions they might have about certain scientific concepts. After I establish concepts I wish to teach  I would provide supporting activities that link and build understanding of the concepts I intend to teach. My role as a teacher would require a move from the traditional presenter of science. My role should be one of the experienced co-learner. Students would be able to discuss the findings of their experiments with me and their peers. During students' inquires I would guide, focus, challenge and encourage student learning.  I would provide individual help to students according to their needs.  I would promote inquiry by asking questions rather then giving answers.  Students would formulate their questions and devise ways to answer them.  They would make their hypothesis based on their questions and on their experiences.  Students would collect data and decide how to represent it. They would organize data from the experiments and make their own conclusions.  They would test the reliability of the conclusions they made.  In the end they would as groups   explain and justify their work in a presentation that models their scientific understanding.

Iowa Core

Iowa Core is a set of standards created by Iowa Board of Education. It looks like that every school district in Iowa will have to develop a written plan to describe its implementation of the Iowa Core Curriculum. Every subject taught in school has its standards described. For example for the science it first identifies the essential concepts that should be taught and developed and then it gives specific standards for each science discipline by grade. Some of the standards for different grade spans overlap but the general idea is that children are taught basic concepts in the first grades and then the standards expand to incorporate more complex concepts.  An example would be one of basic  standards for Physical Science where in K- 2 grade " Understand and apply  knowledge of the positions and motions of objects". This standard appears again in grades 3-5 as  " Understand and apply knowledge of how forces are related to an object's motion".  So the standard it the same in the sense that it describes the motion of objects but in the next grade span it is upgraded to represent more complex knowledge.
Some of the standards overlap across grades. 
Besides the standards that I will have to implement once I am teacher, it is interesting that there is information on the  characteristics of effective instruction  which could give me some beneficial guidelines.

Mosart Website

Mosart tests were developed by a team of researchers in the Science Education Department of Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. These tests measure students misconceptions and their results help teachers of science frame their instruction and start from the scientific concepts that majority of students do not understand well or has misconceptions about them.  They are different from regular tests in that they have questions that test the understanding of very basic concepts,  intermediate and advance scientific concepts across the class.  Some of the more advanced concepts in Mosart test are designed to be hard so that not even the high achieving students cannot grasp them. The average score on these tests is 50%. That is because the tests contain questions that are to be very easy and very hard. This is done in order to cover the understanding of  students in the classroom, the low achieving, the intermediate and the high achieving students.
I think these tests would be very useful to me as teacher as their scores finely discriminate between students of  different level of achievement.  Mosart offers tests that are given prior to instruction and after the instruction. The first ones determine possible students misconceptions and also the science concepts knowledge they understand. The other ones show the understanding and misconceptions of concepts after the instruction. The difference between pre and post tests scores will show if there was any conceptual change in students understanding of science concepts I taught. It will also show me the misconceptions students will hold on even after the instructions.  That would then further gave me insight which concepts I should teach more to develop students' understanding.

Teaching for Conceptual Change: Confronting Children's Experience

The authors of this article state that is very difficult for children to change their thinking in understanding scientific concepts even in the face of different evidence that challenges their thinking. Children simply trust their lifelong convictions since they have limited experience with scientific methods. Children in the middle elementary grades are beginning to use concrete operations. When confronted with new evidence children in these grades tend to revert to previous developmental stage thinking. Children in concrete operations perceive and interpret the world through their feelings rather than reasoning and logic. They usually modify  their experiments to  accommodate their beliefs rather than change their beliefs to fit the  evidence.
That is why children in  Mrs. O'Brien classroom cannot believe and accept the evidence of their experiment, namely that the temperature of the sweaters, hats and rugs, which they always associated in their lifelong experience  with heat, did not raise when they measured it.
Authors suggest several barriers to conceptual change in children.  One of them is stubbornness as children refuse to admit errors in their thinking. Teachers should be very cautious with new terminology as it may be difficult for children to master these new scientific terms  in addition to a new way of thinking.
The other obstacles to conceptual change is children's own perception. They believe more to what they see and hear, which in science does not always work.
In order to achieve conceptual change in children's thinking about scientific concepts teachers should stress relevance to children's everyday life outside of school when explaining scientific phenomena. They should allow children to make predictions when conducting experiments and encourage children to be consistent in their thinking when facing new patterns of thought.
This strategy this teacher applied in the classroom really helped me understand better what is means to confront children's preconceptions and use the probes to support science learning in the classroom.

Uncovering Student Ideas in Science-25 Formative Assessment Probes

The authors of the introduction to the book " Uncovering Student Ideas in Science -25 Formative Assessment Probes provide a lot of ideas for the science teachers how to test students previous knowledge and misconceptions they bring to the science classroom.  Testing previous knowledge and conceptions is done through the formative assessments.  What most of us associate with assessments is summative assassessments, something teachers use in the midterm or the end of course.  Summative assessments the ones that  measure the extent to which students achieved proficiency in the subject.  Formative assessments are continues and are used very often throughout the course of a unit or lesson and they provide the teacher with the set of data about student learning. This data teachers then use to modify their  instruction and curriculum and to provide feedback to the students. Teachers can use various formats to conduct formative assessments: individual, small group or whole group elicitation questions, student interviews, observations, informal conversations, journaling, performance tasks, traditional assessments as quizzes or tests during or after lesson.
The authors provide a lot of formative assessments in the book which they call probes. These probes serve to reveal the types of conceptions students have about common science topics before and throughout instruction.  Because students enter the study of science with many misconceptions, preconceived notions of scientific phenomena based on their everyday experiences.  The formation of  students own conceptions, which maybe correct, partially correct or incorrect continues throughout K-12 school years regardless of whether or not these concepts are taught in the science class.
For real learning to happen teachers should address these preconceptions and then modify their instructions and curriculum based on them.  Otherwise, students will graduate high school and go into college and still continue to hold those same misconceptions because they make sense to them and they were never challenged to test their thinking.
Before reading this  the article " Misconceptions Die Hard" and this introduction to the book " Uncovering Student Ideas in Science -25 Formative Assessment Probes I was completely unaware of such practices that can actually help learning in the classroom.  I think of my science education as a typical one where we were expected to repeat the information teacher provided. I never taught that learning can be improved by considering and exploring students ideas.  I was exposed to the old ways of teaching too long to know any different.  This introduction opens up my eyes to various possibilities of teaching students science.  What is the purpose of science education if it is not going to really help students understands scientific phenomena and objects.  And they can only truly understand it if we as teachers find out what they think and how they understand those.  Once we know their ideas about scientific concepts we can slowly build on their previous knowledge, and provide experiences that support the development of correct conceptual understanding.

Line of Learning continued

As I keep reading our assigned articles, I have to say that my ideas of  learning and teaching have significantly expanded.  Even though I have heard of constructivist theory in Educational Psychology class and teachings of Vygotsky, I really did not have clear understanding what application of that theory represents in the classroom.  Looking at my previous educational experiences, I was completely unfamiliar with different and new learning and teaching strategies. I knew that teaching strategies in the US were different to the ones in Bosnia or the whole of  the Balkans but I did not know how exactly.
While I still lived in Bosnia I talked to some of people that studied at American and Canadian universities. I always asked: " Well, what is it like to study there?" One guy that studied in Canada and came back to Bosnia was a short period told me that it is easier than in Bosnia, less stressful, but they teach you what you need.  I don't think I ever really understood what he meant by that, I just taught it is easier but never knew why.  I did not even know that different teaching practices exist and they they are continually developed and refined by research.  My only notion of American public education was that children were allowed to wander around the classroom and that there was less discipline. I never explored  what was the reason behind such instruction and classroom management.  
The insight that makes me particularly happy is that teachers use various methods of assessment to guide their instruction and that students are assessed in various ways not only the two typical ones.
Also feedback was not very common or familiar notion in my public education. Not that I can recall.
I only remember once in the Shakespeare class at the college, that professor, gave written explanation on the final written exam, where he pointed out the things I did well and the things I should have addressed.  That information gave me more insight into my further studying in preparation for the oral exam. ( in the ex- Yugoslavia countries, all final exams are comprised  of written exam and oral exam for each course ). Even now I think we should have had more assessments prior to the final exam on Shakespeare. In that way if we were on the wrong track or if we missed something, we could have improved that.  That is why I think final exams at the College of Liberal Arts, at  the department of English Language and Literature  in Banja Luka, Bosnia did not necessarily showed real potential and knowledge students could develop in their majors.