Teachers’ use of inquiry and language scaffolding questions when preparing an experiment

This study analyzes data from three national contexts in which teachers worked with the same teaching materials and inquiry classroom activities, investigating teachers’ use of strategies to promote interaction and scaffolding when participating in a professional development program. The data material is collected from three case studies from the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden, respectively. Each case is from a teaching unit about green plants and seed sprouting. In one lesson in this unit, students were involved in planning an experiment with sprouting seeds, and this (similar) lesson was videotaped in three national settings. The main research question is, as follows: How do primary teachers use questions to scaffold conceptual understanding and language use in inquiry science activities? The data analysis shows that teachers ask different kind of questions such as open, closed, influencing and orienting questions. The open, orienting questions induce students to generate their own ideas, while closed orienting and influencing questions often scaffold language and content-specific meaning-making. However, both open, closed, orienting and influencing questions can scaffold student language and conceptual understanding. Often, teacher questions scaffold both language content-specific meaning-making at the same time. The study shows the subtle mechanisms through which teachers can use questions to scaffold student science literacy and thereby including them in classroom interaction

Situational knowledge in physics: The case of electrodynamics

Major difficulties for a novice physics problem solver are how to interpret new problems and how to combine information given in the problem with information already known. A domain expert, by contrast, has the knowledge to take full advantage of problem features at a glance. It takes a long period of practice to acquire such situational knowledge, and it would be desirable for this to be taught more effectively. As a first step, this requires information on how situational knowledge differs across individuals of different competence levels. Related research on mental models and problem representations does not give a direct view on the knowledge subjects have of situations before being confronted with the problem. To assess situational knowledge more directly, we asked participants to respond to physics formulas (from the field of electrodynamics) by describing relevant problem situations. We compared physics problem descriptions by experts (n = 6) and by proficient (n = 6) and less proficient (n = 6) novices. We analyzed the situations that were described at the levels of words, sentences, and complete descriptions. Results indicate that competence is related to the structure of problem situations rather than the use of particular concepts, and that the differences in the use of multiple representations are more prominent than differences in the use of one specific kind of representation. Results also indicate that the differences between experts and novices are along different dimensions than the differences between more and less proficient novices. Implications for teaching are discussed

Students’ reasoning during modeling in an inquiry learning environment

In an inquiry-learning task, computer modeling can be a powerful tool to enhance students’ reasoning and help them improve their understanding. Optimal learning effects in such an environment require a high quality of students reasoning activities. It is not straightforward, however, which type of modeling tool will be most helpful to students’ reasoning. In order to identify the effects of different tools, students working with two common types of tools were compared to a normative description of the modeling process. Also the influence of reasoning activities on the achieved modeling result was examined. Different modeling tools did induce significantly different reasoning activities. Students working with a graphical representation designed more experiments with their own model, formulated more qualitative hypotheses, and spent more time evaluating their own model than students working with a textual representation. Results also indicate that many students have serious difficulties performing this task in a systematic manner. The paper concludes with suggestions for support students might need