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Framing Inquiry in High School Chemistry: Helping Students See the Bigger Picture Brett Criswell* Department of Middle Secondary and Instructional Technology, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia 30302, United States ABSTRACT: Inquiry has been advocated as an effective pedagogical strategy for promoting deep conceptual understanding and more sophisticated scientific thinking by numerous bodies associated with chemistry (and science) education. To allow inquiry to achieve these goals, the teacher must manage the amount of cognitive load experienced by students while they engage in inquiry activities. This article can help teachers address that challenge by discussing the notion of framing (a form of scaffolding) and by presenting a model designed to help teachers more effectively frame inquiry activities. Using the metaphor of a picture frame, the model introduces five components of the framing process that can be employed by teachers as guidelines for developing the background information they will share with students prior to an inquiry activity. Those components are context, goals, actions, tools, and interactions. Providing students with such a carefully developed background can better orient them to the purpose of the inquiry activity, put boundaries on the problem space they will be exploring, and reduce the cognitive load as they engage in the activity, all of which should improve the inquiry learning experience. KEYWORDS: High School/Introductory Chemistry, Inquiry-Based/Discovery Learning, Learning Theories
’ PREPARING THE PALETTE John Dewey stated that, “Scientific principles and laws do not lie on the surface of nature. They are hidden, and must be wrested from nature by an active and elaborate technique of inquiry” (ref 1, p 32). Part of the labor of science is to use the process of inquiry to uncover scientific conceptions. Researchers have argued that students will better comprehend science if they engage in authentic inquiry experiences with features similar to those of scientific investigations.2,3 This has led to the promotion of curricular materials and teaching practices based on the idea of project-based science.4,5 Further, various national reform documents6 8 have advocated inquiry as an effective teaching strategy for helping students attain a deeper understanding of scientific ideas and more sophisticated forms of scientific thinking. This Journal has supported efforts to make inquiry-oriented practices more common at both the K 12 and college levels through a number of articles it has published related to this pedagogical domain. Those articles have presented techniques and activities with an inquiry focus for elementary9 and highschool classrooms,10 college laboratories,11 and even informal settings.12 Other publications in this Journal have described how teachers might design inquiry-based learning environments,13 presented an analysis of resources on the Internet to identify those that serve as Web-based platforms for chemistry inquiry,14 explored the attitudes expressed by teachers and students toward inquiry,15 and examined the role of teachers’ beliefs in their willingness and ability to enact inquiry-based strategies.16 While they delineate the potential educational benefits to using inquiry practices, the articles referenced above also acknowledge the challenges to bringing such practices to fruition. Anderson17 has proposed that these challenges can be organized into three dimensions: the technical, the political, and the cultural (ref 17, p 8). Focusing on the technical dimension, Copyright r 2011 American Chemical Society and Division of Chemical Education, Inc.
researchers in educational psychology have indicated that inquiry approaches can, in fact, be less effective than more traditional approaches (e.g., direct instruction) if the cognitive load18 placed on the students is not taken into consideration and properly managed.19,20 This assertion was echoed in a study comparing student outcomes on an expository version of an experiment to an open-inquiry version of the same experiment;21 the researchers noted that (ref 21, p 351) The students with [the] low attitude position [towards content knowledge and experiments] needed more support to meet the challenge of an open-inquiry experiment, the support being a clearer explanation of the aims, and feedback from the instructor during the experiment In other words, as Bruck and Towns22 have pointed out, teachers must lay the proper foundation and slowly build up to more complex inquiry experiences. One form that this foundation could take is carefully designed scaffolding strategies that can offer guidance to students as they first struggle with the demands on both content acquisition and scientific reasoning that inquiry produces, and then can be faded as the students become more proficient at meeting these demands.23 25 Acknowledging the roots of this concept in the work of Wood et al.,27 Pea explains scaffolding this way (ref 27, p 430): Scaffolding situations are those in which the learner gets assistance or support to perform a task beyond his or her own reach if pursued independently when “unassisted”. In elaborating on this idea, Pea26 identifies two main categories of scaffolding strategies: (i) Channeling and focusing and (ii) modeling. Further, he suggests that practices representative Published: November 15, 2011 199
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of teachers attending to or not attending to its components in orienting students to an investigation. Figure 1 presents that model pictorially.
Figure 1. The framing model.
’ PAINTING THE BIGGER PICTURE The model uses the metaphor of a picture frame to symbolize the process of framing an educational (inquiry) activity. The picture itself represents students actually engaging in the learning experience (in the case of Figure 1, it is of a chemistry class testing a proposed mixture of zinc and sulfur). Each side of the frame signifies one component of the model, with the hook on which the picture is hanging denoting the final component. In the paragraphs that follow, each of these components will be described to present a complete depiction of the model, with examples included to provide a richer texture to that description. Most of those examples will come from data collected as five high school chemistry teachers, Hannah, Marty, Nancy, Sandy, and Sarah, enacted the same zinc sulfur reaction lesson that provided the dialogue excerpt in the opening section.28 Other examples will be drawn from my observations of a couple of preservice chemistry teachers trying to guide students through what those preservice teachers saw as inquiry investigations. Context
The first component, context, refers to the background provided and the setting composed for the activity that is about to take place. The symbolism of the picture hook is intentional because a well-crafted context piques the students’ interest (acts as a “hook”) and gives them a reason to be invested in the learning event. A very powerful way to do this is to forge a link between the features of the activity and students’ familiar experience, as for instance by tying the problem solving required in the zinc sulfur reaction lesson to the building of a model rocket engine or the preparation of other pyrotechnic mixtures. Besides the positive motivational effect of doing this, constructing bridges to students’ familiar experience will help to activate their prior knowledge29 to a greater extent. The context should also create connections to the larger storyline that is the curriculum for the course in which the activity is embedded. Insuring that this happens will help students see the activity not as an isolated event but as another act in an ongoing play. With such curricular ties made salient to them, students will be more likely to use knowledge generated in previous activities as a resource in the current activity. This produces a sense in students of what Engle calls intercontextuality, or “connections between contexts” (ref 30, p 453), which she showed supports transfer of learning between educational experiences. The importance of building bridges to both the students’ everyday world and to the course curriculum can be illustrated by returning to the lesson from which the initial excerpt was taken, which occurred in Nancy’s honors chemistry class. In framing the zinc sulfur reaction investigation for the students in that class, Nancy had made a thorough connection only to a previous lab activity in which one of the same reactants, zinc, was used; she just briefly mentioned the relation of the reaction to the chemistry of model rocket engines. Both the excerpt presented in the opening section and interviews with students indicated that the lack of an “anchor” in their familiar experience caused them to be confused about the activity’s purpose. In a later [lower-level chemistry] class, Nancy created a context in which both the previous lab activity and the chemistry of model rocket engines
of the first category provide assistance by orienting the learner to relevant features of the task and by putting limits on the size of the problem space the learner needs to explore. The purpose of this article is to discuss an aspect of scaffolding connected to Pea’s category of channeling and focusing, an aspect I will call framing because it will make available a convenient metaphor for picturing the process of addressing this mode of scaffolding effectively. To prime the reader for the discussion of that metaphor, she or he is asked to consider the dialogue below that occurred about 15 min into a lesson in a high school chemistry class: Teacher: All right. Should we try it? Are you ready? [Inserts magnesium ribbon into a pile made from a mixture of zinc and sulfur based on amounts proposed by students.] Female student: Wait, whoa. I don’t get what we’re going to see. Teacher: You don’t get what we’re going to see? Female student: Yeah. Like, what are we trying to do here? Teacher: We are trying to make this ... It’s going to react—it’s going to be a very exothermic reaction. From this excerpt, it is apparent that the female student is not clear about the objective, how that objective will be achieved, and so on, for this lesson, a lesson in which the class was, as a whole, asked to determine the ideal mixture of zinc and sulfur for a reaction that is used to fuel certain model rocket engines. Typically, as teachers, we are prone to blame that lack of clarity on students: They are not paying close enough attention to the discussion or are not writing down key information. However, it is likely that we, as teachers, need to shoulder more of the blame for situations like this because we often fail to properly frame the learning experience for our students by not channeling their attention to the resources and skills needed to engage in the experience or by not focusing their explorations on a bounded problem space. In the sections that follow, the components of a model that offers guidelines for framing inquiry activities will be described. Additionally, the model’s utility will be demonstrated by presenting examples from chemistry classrooms of the results 200
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were given significant consideration, and there were no instances of obvious confusion as to the objective of the lesson captured in either the dialogue or the interviews with students from that class.
we’re going to be looking at [reveals the reaction on an overhead transparency]. In both cases essentially the same goal is identified: solving a problem that involves determining the amount of a chemical to use in a given reaction. However, there is a difference in the way that goal is conveyed in the two cases: In the earlier class, it is expressed in the form of the familiar routine of beginning class with a “lesson essential question”; in the second class, it is expressed as a unique and challenging effort that the students will undertake. A goal presented in the first form is likely to cause students to approach the activity with the mindset of just “doing the lesson”, while a goal stated in the second form is more likely to promote an attitude in students of actually “doing the science”.36 That such an effect on the way the students approached the activity did occur is supported by the fact that students in the earlier class asked a number of questions indicative of trying to elicit the “right answer” from the teacher, while such questions were not found in the dialogue of students in the later class.37
Goals
While the meaning of the second component in the model, goals, is likely to be apparent to the reader, what may not be so obvious are (i) the nature of the goals that we should make explicit to students; and (ii) the influence of the way the goals are presented on the form of participation students exhibit during an activity. With regards to the nature of the goals, teachers are prone to focus their framing on cognitive goals, at the expense of giving value to other kinds of goals. For instance, most science teachers would be reluctant to emphasize aesthetic goals when preparing students for an activity. However, as Poincaire31 noted, “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful to do so. He studies it because he takes pleasure in it, and he takes pleasure in it because it is beautiful” (ref 31, p 22). Poincaire’s quote indicates that aesthetic considerations motivate scientific pursuits, and thus, it seems reasonable to include aesthetic goals in our set of expectations for students.32 Further, research has indicated that tapping into students’ aesthetic sensibilities can support inquiry learning.33 Based on a suggestion I made, Andy, a preservice teacher, presented his students with the aesthetic goal of answering the question, “Are some molecules more beautiful than others?”, prior to having them engage in an activity designed to guide them to an understanding of the principles of VSEPR theory. Following that activity, Andy asked students, “What makes one person more attractive than another?”, then introduced them to the Web site SymFace.34 This set the stage for a second inquiry investigation in which students were asked to put a group of models of common molecules (water, methane, carbon dioxide, etc.) into groups based on any criteria that seemed logical. Several groups in each class recognized molecular symmetry as a basis for creating such groups. Andy’s mentor indicated that the setting of aesthetic goals for this series of experiences helped students better understand the difference between symmetrical and asymmetrical molecules than they had in previous years. As with aesthetic goals, many science teachers fail to give attention to social goals, such as developing an effective group dynamic for solving a problem, even though it has been shown that the character of student student interactions has an important impact on learning.35 If teachers make such goals relevant to students in the way they frame activities, then students would be more likely to consider social aspects of their learning as they engage in the activities. Related to the significance of the way goals are presented to students, consider the differences in the two excerpts below from Sarah’s enactments of the zinc sulfur reaction lesson: Sarah [to students in her period 3 academic class]: Okay, let’s just get started here. The “lesson essential question” is, “How can mass mass stoichiometry be used to determine unknown amounts of reactants or products?” This is the reaction that we’re going to be talking about today [pointing to equation on transparency]. and Sarah [to students in her period 7 academic class]: All right, this lesson today is going to go a little differently than, um...the lectures that you’re used to. Um, I’m going to present you with a problem, and it’s your job as a class to—well we are going to try to solve the problem together... Um, this is the reaction
Actions
The third component, actions, refers to the steps or processes that need to be executed in order to achieve the activity’s goal. This is the one component of the model to which teachers give a great deal of attention, although, as with goals, what aspects of this component are given attention is often limited. When there is a predesigned experimental procedure to follow, teachers tend to emphasize the actions required for students to properly “follow directions”. While such a concern for proper adherence to procedural details is certainly necessary from a safety standpoint, it should not overshadow efforts to frame the actions needed to engage in true scientific sense making,38 such as testing hypotheses and models,39 coordinating evidence and theories,40 and recognition of anomalous data that might lead to new and interesting lines of inquiry.41 In cases in which the activity involves a less-guided form of inquiry,42 teachers often provide scant information related to the action component. Although they may see this as a necessary feature of making the activity truly “inquiry” in nature, teachers need to realize that part of the purpose of framing any activity is to place boundaries around the problem space so that students can be reasonably expected to navigate that space under the constraints present in most classrooms. Further, in such activities, students need to be oriented to aspects of the inquiry process with which they might not have had much previous experience. For instance, in the zinc sulfur reaction lesson, students needed to give some forethought to what criteria would be used to judge when one proposed zinc sulfur mixture was better than another to use as a rocket engine fuel. Because the teachers observed generally did not orient students to this issue, students in a few of the classes were left uncertain as to what sample had been shown by the empirical tests to be the best solution to the problem posed. Tools
With regards to the fourth component, tools, the teacher’s objectives in framing the activity should be to (i) get students to broaden their view of what tools are available to solve a given problem; (ii) help students see the relationships between the actions needed to achieve the activity’s goal and the tools that might be used to perform those actions; and (iii) make students aware of why a given tool is designed in the manner it is to serve a 201
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particular purpose. Related to the first objective, an interesting pattern emerged in the way students developed their solution to the zinc sulfur reaction problem in the set of classes taught by Hannah: In each class, only one group used the periodic table in generating their solution and that group was always the one sitting right next to a large periodic table on one side of the room. Because Hannah had not oriented the students to think about all of the resources in the room as being available to solve this problem, only those students positioned in close proximity to the periodic table saw it as a tool for achieving that aim. An example of the significance of the second objective was found in the way the activity unfolded differently in the classrooms of two teachers who were at the same school. In Sandy’s lessons, she wove an analogy to cooking throughout her introduction and in this way framed the activity as the search for the proper chemical “recipe” for the reaction. As a result, most of the groups in her three classes (11 out of 15) saw a need to convert the word equation she had given them for the reaction (zinc and sulfur make zinc sulfide) into a balanced chemical equation and use that in creating their proposals. By comparison, Hannah (who also had provided students the word equation) did not have any feature within her framing of the activity that might have oriented students to think about the relationship between the actions needed to solve the problem and the availability of the chemical equation as a tool. As a result, despite the fact that Hannah’s students had covered the same content prior to this lesson as had Sandy’s students, only 4 out of 18 groups in her classes used the balanced equation in deriving their solutions, and only 1 group explicitly mentioned this when discussing the rationale for its solution. A quote from Wells captures the importance of the third objective in framing the use of tools within a science activity: “In many cases, an explanation of how the tool functions to achieve the purpose for which it was designed may also facilitate learning how to use it” (ref 43, pp 347 348). For instance, students needed to understand how the periodic table came to have the format that it did, including how accurate relative atomic mass values were determined by Cannizzaro,44 to be able to effectively use it as a tool to solve the zinc sulfur reaction problem.
why you chose that amount of sulfur. So you’re gonna have to think about this a little bit, all right. Some people may have some ideas; work off their ideas. Uh...your group has to come to a consensus: you have to agree on one amount of sulfur and a reason why. If you have more than one reason why you’re choosing that amount, that’s fine—but you have to come up to a consensus of one number. Does that mean that you can’t argue back and forth a little bit with different numbers? No, you can do that. But in the end, you need to decide on one amount. First, the teacher indicates that the students are to view each other’s thoughts as capital off of which to build their solutions: “work off their ideas”. Second, he suggests that different ideas may arise within a group and that students will have to negotiate, perhaps argue, with each other about the validity of these ideas until a “consensus” is reached. In this way, he is structuring the interactions between the members of the group to make them as cooperative as possible, rather than competitive. The one thing not addressed in this passage is the nature of the interactions that should occur later in the activity when each group would share its solution to the zinc sulfur problem with the larger class. Without answers to questions such as, “Should we continue to build off of each other’s ideas?” and “Will we still be trying to reach a consensus as to an appropriate amount of zinc?”, students were less well prepared to engage in the whole-class discussion that preceded the testing of proposals. Partly as a result of this, there were relatively few interactions between students during the whole-class discussion.49 The exchanges between students and the tools they use are probably not seen by teachers as an interaction, but research has shown that they actually represent a quite important form of communication.50 A powerful example of this came from the classroom of a preservice teacher named Brenda, who, using curricular materials provided by her mentor, was having students engage in what was functionally a verification lab: generating the heating curve for water (the class had already gone over the general form of a heating curve). While collecting the data to create the lower portion of the curve, one student became concerned that the lowest temperature reached by the thermometer was 2 °C and asked Brenda about the validity of this value. Brenda simply explained this unexpected value as resulting from either a poorly calibrated thermometer or an improper positioning of the thermometer. Following this event, I suggested to Brenda that she use such opportunities to guide students to think more deeply about the tool being used and what they can learn about the phenomenon under investigation from the data it was providing. Later in the same class, a student asked Brenda whether the sample of water she was heating, which was at ∼90 °C and was producing bubbles, was at its boiling point. Instead of simply giving her an answer, Brenda used what van Zee and Minstrell identify as a reflective toss51 and asked the student what the boiling point represented and therefore how she might determine whether the water was at that point or not. Instead of responding to that query, another student in the group asked what the bubbles were made of, and, through some guiding questions from Brenda, the group of students reached the conclusion that it must be gaseous water, rather than the more common suggestions of air, or hydrogen and oxygen.52 It is likely that more inquiry-oriented events such as the one just described could have occurred during this laboratory had Brenda framed the activity in such a way as to help students see
Interactions
The final component of the model, interactions, is arguably the one requiring the most emphasis if the purpose of the activity is for students to engage in authentic scientific inquiry45 and genuine knowledge building,46 and yet it is the one generally given the least consideration as teachers frame learning experiences for students. Interactions represent the exchanges of information, both verbal and nonverbal, that occur between participants (students and teachers) and between participants and tools as the actions needed to achieve the goal of the activity are performed. Those interactions have the potential to be very complex47 and, therefore, rich sources of ideas for students, but teachers generally do not prepare students for this complexity. As a result, the interactions during inquiry activities often end up being simplistic, frustrating, and an underdeveloped resource for students.48 An example of how one of the teachers (Marty) conducting the zinc sulfur reaction lesson attempted to orient his students to this key component can be seen in the excerpt below: Teacher: Your job—in a lab group—is gonna be to figure out how many grams of sulfur you’re gonna add to that zinc to get the best possible reaction. And then...you are going to explain 202
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the tools and materials they were using as collaborators in a scientific investigation. Specifically, the students could have been oriented to treating the reading of the temperature on the thermometer as the beginning of an exchange between themselves and that instrument. For instance, Brenda could have prepared students for responding to situations such as the anomalous melting temperature by providing them with questions they could have running through their minds like, “If I have a certain expectation of a result from using a tool, and I don’t get that result, what does that mean—what is the tool telling me?” In his book describing the effective enactment of project-based science, Polman4 discusses the “time-honored scientist’s image of ‘talking with your data’” (ref 4, p 88). Scientists recognize that if they approach their instruments and their data with the right mindset, these tools will talk back to them; if we want students to take an inquiry stance in science classrooms, they have to be helped to see these tools in the same way.
and interactions) in a way that can aid them in effectively framing learning experiences for their students. A final note about the model presented in this article. Teachers should not interpret the message of this paper to be that they should try to address every feature of each component whenever they introduce students to an inquiry activity. Doing so would require inordinate amounts of time and would be counterproductive, as students would get lost in all of the details. Instead, the message is that a set of items is available that teachers should reflect upon in preparation for guiding students through an inquiry experience. Out of that set, teachers must pick a reasonable number of critical items to weave together into the background they provide for a specific activity. As teachers become more comfortable with the model, they can find ways to incorporate items that do not fit into the background into written materials provided to students (as several teachers conducting the zinc sulfur reaction lesson did), or into lessons leading up to the activity, or into the overall culture of the class (e.g., the proper group dynamics for engaging in inquiry). Further, they could combine these preactivity scaffolding practices with some that are embedded in the activity itself, such as using coupled inquiry,55 or some that follow the activity, such as employing the science writing heuristic.56 Such a combination of strategies could be used extensively early in students’ exposure to inquiry experiences and then be faded57 as students master the skills needed to conduct inquiry investigations independently. In this way, inquiry could realize its full potential as a powerful pedagogical strategy.
’ UNVEILING THE FINAL WORK As noted at the outset of this paper, the practice of inquiry science teaching has been elevated to a high status within the chemistry and broader science education community. This high status is symbolized by the National Science Teachers Association’s position statement on scientific inquiry,53 which contains the following passage: Scientific inquiry is a powerful way of understanding science content. Students learn how to ask questions and use evidence to answer them. In the process of learning the strategies of scientific inquiry, students learn to conduct an investigation and collect evidence from a variety of sources, develop an explanation from the data, and communicate and defend their conclusions. However, for the potential of scientific inquiry as “a powerful way of understanding science content” to be realized, teachers need to be aware of the complexity underlying the inquiry experiences they are providing their students and find ways at times to moderate that complexity. If this potential pitfall is not addressed, then inquiry science teaching will, as some researchers have shown,19,20 produce less robust comprehension of science concepts than more traditional teaching strategies, such as direct instruction. My motivation for writing this article was having too many preservice and inservice teachers express their frustrations related to recognizing such an outcome following efforts to provide inquiry experiences for their students. The goal of this article was to support teachers in eliminating some of that frustration by introducing a model related to the notion of framing, which, as noted in the opening section, is a form of scaffolding related to Pea’s category of channeling and focusing.26 As Wood et al. noted in their seminal article in which they introduced the idea of scaffolding,54 one of the components of this process is to reduce the degrees of freedom for the learner in a problem-solving task. Using the framing model described in the preceding pages can help toward that end by making salient to students the aspects of the activity that are the most essential to achieving the desired learning outcomes, as well as to gaining the unexpected insights that inquiry experiences can produce. Just as it is the aim of teachers to orient their students to activities in a manner that can help them successfully participate in those activities, it was the intention of this article to orient teachers to the five components of this model (context, goals, actions, tools,
’ AUTHOR INFORMATION Corresponding Author
*E-mail:
[email protected].
’ ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am deeply indebted to the reviewer who pointed out several important connections to the literature on scaffolding that I had neglected in the original version of this manuscript and who therefore helped to significantly improve the quality of this article. I also am grateful to Kimberly Hobbs who (once again) supported my publishing efforts by providing the graphic that is contained within this document. ’ REFERENCES (1) Dewey, J. Reconstruction in Philosophy; Beacon Press: Boston, MA, 1971. (2) Chinn, C. A.; Malhotra, B. A. Epistemologically Authentic Inquiry in Schools: A Theoretical Framework for Evaluating Inquiry Tasks. Sci. Educ. 2002, 86 (2), 175–218. (3) Means, B. Melding Authentic Science, Technology, and InquiryBased Teaching: Experiences of the GLOBE Program. J. Sci. Educ. Tech. 1998, 7 (1), 97–105. (4) Polman, J. L. Designing Project-Based Science: Connecting Learners through Guided Inquiry; Teachers College Press: New York, 2000. (5) Marx, R. W.; Blumenfeld, P. C.; Krajcik, J. S.; Soloway, E. Enacting Project-Based Science. Elem. School J. 1997, 97 (4), 341–358. (6) American Association for the Advancement of Science. Benchmarks for Science Literacy; Oxford University Press: New York, 1994. (7) National Research Council. National Science Education Standards; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 1995. (8) Kindergarten through Eighth Grade Committee on Science Learning. Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8; National Academies Press: Washington, DC, 2007. 203
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(31) Poincare, H. Science and Method; Cosimo Classics: New York, 1908 and 2010. (32) It should be noted that the rest of this quote distinguishes the kind of beauty “which strikes the senses” from “that more intimate beauty which comes from the harmonious order of its parts”. This does not detract, though, from the notion of setting aesthetic goals. As indicated by the example presented in the succeeding paragraph, such goals can have positive intellectual as well as humanistic effects. (33) Milne, I. A Sense of Wonder, Arising from Aesthetic Experiences, Should be the Starting Point for Inquiry in Primary Science. Sci. Educ. Int. 2010, 21 (2), 102–115. (34) SymFace Web Page. http://www.symmeter.com/symfacer. htm (accessed Nov 2011). (35) Slavin, R. Educational Psychology: Theory and Practice, 9th ed.; Allyn and Bacon: Boston, MA, 2008. (36) Jimenez-Alexandre, M. P.; Rodriguez, A. B.; Duschl, R. Doing the Lesson” or “Doing Science”: Argument in High School Genetics. Sci. Educ. 2000, 84 (6), 757–792. (37) Some readers are likely to argue that this just might as well be a function of differences in the nature of the students in the two classes. However, during a postlesson interview, Sarah indicated that it was her earlier class (period 3) that normally worked more independently on activities and that her later class (period 7) was more prone to seeking her help before trying to solve a problem on their own. (38) Mortimer, E.; Scott, P. Meaning Making in Secondary Science Classrooms; Open University Press: Philadelphia, PA, 2003. (39) Justi, R.; Gilbert, J. K. Models and Modelling in Chemical Education. In Chemical Education: Towards Research-Based Practice; Gilbert, J. K., et al. , Eds.; Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 2002; pp 47 67. (40) Hatano, G.; Inagaki, K. Sharing Cognition through Collective Comprehension Activity. In Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition; Resnick, L. B., Levine, J. M., Teasley, S. D., Eds.; American Psychological Association: Washington, DC, 1991; pp 331 348. (41) Echevarria, M. The Influence of Anomalies on Knowledge Construction and Scientific Reasoning during Inquiry. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Seattle, WA, April 10 14, 2001. (42) Martin-Hansen, L. Defining Inquiry: Exploring the Many Types of Inquiry in the Science Classroom. Sci. Teach. 2002, 69 (2), 34–37. (43) Wells, G. Learning To Use Scientific Concepts. Cult. Stud. Sci. Educ. 2008, 3 (2), 329–350. (44) An excellent resource that contains letters by Cannizzaro outlining a course in chemical philosophy and describing the logic of how he determined accurate values for relative atomic masses is at http://www.chemteam.info/Chem-History/Cannizzaro.html (accessed Nov 2011). (45) Bulte, A. M. W.; Westbroek, H. B.; de Jong, O.; Pilot, A. A Research Approach to Designing Chemistry Education using Authentic Practices as Contexts. Int. J. Sci. Educ. 2006, 28 (9), 1063–1086. (46) Bereiter, C.; Scardamalia, M. Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise; Open Press: Chicago, IL, 1993. (47) Woodruff, E.; Meyer, K. Explanations from Intra- and InterGroup Discourse: Students Building Knowledge in the Science Classroom. Res. Sci. Educ. 1997, 27 (1), 25–39. (48) Mercer, N.; Dawes, L.; Wegerif, R.; Sams, C. Reasoning as a Scientist: Ways of Helping Children To Use Language to Learn Science. Br. Educ. Res. J. 1994, 30 (3), 359–377. (49) The main factor in limiting the interactions between students was the pattern of talk that was established in this whole-class discussion in which students directed all of their proposals and justifications towards the teacher and tended not to look at members of other groups as they were presenting their ideas. (50) Kelly, G. J.; Crawford, T. Students’ Interaction with Computer Representations: Analysis of Discourse in Laboratory Groups. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 1996, 33 (7), 693–707.
(9) Wink, D. J.; Hwang-Choe, J. H. Pennies and Eggs: Initiation into Inquiry Learning for Preservice Elementary Education Teachers. J. Chem. Educ. 2008, 85 (3), 396–398. (10) Bartholow, M. A Class Inquiry into Newton’s Cooling Curve. J. Chem. Educ. 2007, 84 (10), 1684–1685. (11) Eby, E.; Deal, S. T. A Green, Guided-Inquiry-Based Electrophilic Aromatic Substitution for the Organic Chemistry Laboratory. J. Chem. Educ. 2008, 85 (10), 1426–1428. (12) Rowat, A. C.; Hollar, K. A.; Stone, H. A.; Rosenberg, D. The Science of Chocolate: Interactive Activities on Phase Transition, Emulsification, and Nucleation. J. Chem. Educ. 2011, 88 (1), 29–33. (13) van Rens, L.; van der Schee, J.; Pilot, A. Teaching Molecular Diffusion Using an Inquiry Approach. Diffusion Activities in a Secondary School Inquiry-Learning Community. J. Chem. Educ. 2009, 86 (12), 1437–1441. (14) Shive, L. E.; Bodzin, A. M.; Cates, W. M. A National Science Standards-Based Study of Web-Based Inquiry in Chemistry. J. Chem. Educ. 2004, 81 (7), 1066–1072. (15) Deters, K. M. Student Opinions Regarding Inquiry-Based Labs. J. Chem. Educ. 2005, 82 (8), 1178–1180. (16) Roehrig, G. H.; Luft, J. A. Inquiry Teaching in High School Chemistry Classrooms: The Role of Knowledge and Beliefs. J. Chem. Educ. 2004, 81 (10), 1510–1516. (17) Anderson, R. D. Reforming Science Teaching: What Research Says about Inquiry. J. Sci. Teach. Educ. 2002, 12 (1), 1–12. (18) Sweller, J. Cognitive Load during Problem Solving: Effects on Learning. Cogn. Sci. 1988, 12, 257–285. (19) Mayer, R. Should There Be a Three-Strikes Rule against Pure Discovery Learning? The Case for Guided Methods of Instruction. Am. Psychol. 2004, 59 (1), 14–19. (20) Kirschner, P. A.; Sweller, J.; Clark, R. E. Why Minimal Guidance during Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and InquiryBased Teaching. Educ. Psychol. 2006, 41 (2), 75–86. (21) Berg, C. A. R.; Bergendahl, V. C. B.; Lundberg, B. K. S.; Tibell, L. A. E. Benefiting from an Open-Ended Experiment? A Comparison of Attitudes to, and Outcomes of an Expository versus an Open-Inquiry Version of the Same Experiment. Int. J. Sci. Educ. 2003, 25 (3), 251–272. (22) Bruck, L. B.; Towns, M. H. Preparing Students To Benefit from Inquiry-Based Activities in the Chemistry Laboratory: Guidelines and Suggestions. J. Chem. Educ. 2009, 86 (7), 820–822. (23) Johnson, M.; Smith, M. Designing Appropriate Scaffolding for Student Science Projects. J. Coll. Sci. Teach. 2008, 38 (2), 24–29. (24) Puntambekar, S.; Kolodner, J. L. Toward Implementing Distributed Scaffolding: Helping Students Learn Science from Design. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 2005, 42 (2), 185–217. (25) Flick, L. B. Teaching Science as Inquiry by Scaffolding Student Thinking. Sci. Scope 2003, 26 (8), 34–38. (26) Pea, R. D. The Social and Technological Dimensions of Scaffolding and Related Theoretical Concepts for Learning, Education, and Human Activity. J. Learning Sci. 2004, 13 (3), 423–451. (27) Wood, D.; Bruner, J.; Ross, G. The role of tutoring in problem solving. J. Child Psych. Psychiatry Allied Disc. 1976, 17, 89–100. (28) The names of the teachers are pseudonyms. The examples and the dialogue excerpts presented were part of a data set collected by the author within a larger research project focused on how science talk unfolds during inquiry-oriented activities such as the zinc sulfur reaction lesson. As noted in the first section, this particular lesson involved the teachers asking students to determine the amount of sulfur required to combine with a given amount of zinc in order to produce the ideal reaction for a model-rocket engine. (29) Ausubel, D. P.; Novak, J. D.; Hanesian, H. Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View, 2nd ed.; Holt, Rinehart, and Winston: New York, 1978. (30) Engle, R. Framing Interactions To Foster Generative Learning: A Situative Explanation of Transfer in a Community of Learners Classroom. J. Learn. Sci. 2006, 15 (4), 451–498. 204
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(51) van Zee, E.; Minstrell, J. Using Questioning To Guide Student Thinking. J. Learn. Sci. 1997, 6 (2), 227–269. (52) Driver, R.; Squires, A.; Rushworth, P.; Wood-Robinson, V. Making Sense of Secondary Science; Routledge: New York, 1993. (53) The National Science Teacher’s Position Statement on Scientific Inquiry. http://www.nsta.org/about/positions/inquiry.aspx (accessed Nov 2011). (54) Wood, D.; Bruner, J. S.; Ross, G. The Role of Tutoring in Problem Solving. J. Child Psych. Psychiatry 1976, 17, 89–100. (55) Eick, C.; Meadows, L.; Balkcom, J. Breaking into Inquiry. Sci. Teach. 2005, 72 (7), 49–53. (56) Rudd, J. A.,; Greenbowe, T. J.; Hand, B. M.; Legg, M. J. Using the Science Writing Heuristic To Move toward an Inquiry-Based Laboratory Curriculum: An Example from Physical Equilibrium. J. Chem. Educ. 2001, 78 (12), 1680–1686. (57) McNeil, K. L.; Lizotte, D. J.; Kracjik, J.; Marx, R. W. Supporting Students’ Construction of Scientific Explanations by Fading Scaffolds in Instructional Materials. J. Learn. Sci. 2006, 15 (2), 153–191.
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