“Mapping to know”: The effects of representational guidance and reflective assessment on scientific inquiry

Abstract

This study documents an instructional methodology to teach a fundamental reasoning skill during scientific inquiry: the evaluation of empirical evidence against multiple hypotheses. Using the “design experiment” approach, with iterative cycles we developed an instructional framework that lends itself to authentic scientific inquiry by providing a nontraditional approach to three aspects of learning: the activities students are engaged in during scientific inquiry, the tools students use while constructing knowledge, and the assessment of learning outcomes. The present article focuses on the contribution of two components of this instructional framework: the effect of technology‐based knowledge‐representation tools and the effect of reflective assessment on learning to act and think scientifically. The technological tools of the framework allowed students to represent their developing knowledge of natural phenomena with either graphical mapping or with word‐processed prose. The reflective assessment we used was a form of inquiry rubrics that provided clear expectations for optimal progress throughout the entire process of inquiry by indicating specific assessment criteria for the various components of scientific inquiry. The results indicated that in real‐life‐like classroom investigations designed to teach students how to evaluate data in relation to theories, the use of evidence mapping is superior to prose writing. Furthermore, this superior effect of evidence mapping was greatly enhanced by the use of reflective assessment throughout the inquiry process. Modes of representational guidance explain both the superior effect of evidence mapping as well as the discrepancy between the effects of explicit reflection on evidence mapping compared to prose writing. These results have fundamental implications for the development of cognitively‐based classroom learning environments and for the design of further research on learning. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sci Ed 86:264–286, 2002; DOI 10.1002/sce.10004