Inquiry, Modeling, and Metacognition: Making Science Accessible to All Students

“…on the belief that students learn best when the problems they solve in school are inspired by their own questions in the world [12] and in response to research revealing the effectiveness of inquiry-based learning across a number of different education contexts (e.g., References [4, 58, 59], etc.).”

“…and to enable students to experience, understand, and appreciate the ways in which these understandings evolve by using the tools, language, and ways of reasoning that are characteristic of the scientific community (cf. Driver, Guesne, & Tiberghien, 1985; Lemke, 1990; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Nevertheless, with a few notable exceptions (e.g., Brown, 1992, 1997; Fennema et al., 1996; White & Fredriksen, 1998), most of the research in the intersection between cognition and instruction is carried out by researchers whose predilection is to conduct their work in either the psychology…”

“Many researchers have also argued that adopting more authentic inquiry-based pedagogies will lead to deeper conceptual understanding as well as a greater awareness of the nature of science and of the processes of scientific inquiry among students (Chinn & Malhotra, 2002 ; Singer, Marx, Krajcik, & Chambers, 2000 ; Whit…”

“White and Frederiksen ’ s (1998) Thinker Tools curriculum promoted regulative skills via scaffolds for planning, monitoring, and evaluation.”

“Research literature (Krajcik, Blumenfeld, Marx, & Soloway, 2000 ; Metz, 2000 ; White & Frederiksen, 1998 ) and national standards (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993 ; National Research Council, 1996 ) call for students to engage in a range of scientific inquiry practices.”

“Inquiry learning occurs when learners ask questions (either self-induced or teacher-induced), hunt for answers, evaluate the quality of the answers, and ask related questions in pursuit of answering the main question (Graesser et al. 2005; White and Frederiksen 1998).”

“A formative assessment component such as in the ThinkerTools Inquiry Project (Schwarz & White, 2005; White & Frederiksen, 1998) where students engage themselves in so-called ‘reflective assessment’ can be helpful as well.”

“This is vital because the components of problem solving are often invisible to students [11] or, at the very least, are never explicitly, externally represented [31].”

“Interactive computer simulations have often been used for curricula that require process active inquiry and modeling (Barab, Hay, Barnett, & Keating, 2000; Fretz, Wu, Zhang, Davis, & Krajcik, 2002; Reiser et al., 2001; Vahey, Enyedy, & Gifford, 2000; White & Fredericksen, 1998).”

“For example, White and Frederiksen (1998) found that inquiry-oriented curriculum and metacognitive reflection assessment was beneficial for both low-achieving and high-achieving students, and that the effect was particularly greater for those with lower achievement levels.”

“Collaborative inquiry, a major research strand in the field of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), can bring students many benefits such as the development of collaboration skills, agency, critical thinking, metacognition and regulation (Raes et al. 2014; White and Frederiksen 1998; Zohar and Dori 2003).”

“For example, ThinkerTools (White & Frederickson, 1998) used symbolic elements to represent both realworld objects and abstract concepts allowing middle school learners of varying ability levels to explore Newtonian mechanics.”

“For instance, research shows that when teachers incorporate recommended reforms into their instruction, student learning improves (Geier et al. 2008; White and Frederiksen 1998; Williams and Linn 2002), and student interest, engagement, and motivation in science is enhanced (Engle and Conant 2002; Mistler-Jackson and…”

“A number of classroom studies have shown that instructional programs with a strong focus on meta-cognition can improve students’ learning outcomes (Brown & Campione, 1996; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; White & Frderiksen, 1998).”

“…following the lines of research such as students’ understanding/conceptions of models’ nature (Grosslight, Unger, Jay, & Smith, 1991; Harrison & Treagust, 1996; Schwarz & White, 2005), and the role of modelling in the learning process (Clement, 2000; Tiberghien, 1994; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Models of scientific phenomena take a central place in contemporary views of science education (e.g., Gilbert, Boulter, & Rutherford, 1998; Raghavan, Satoris, & 1206 P. H. M. Sins et al. Glaser, 1998; Schecker, 1993; Stratford, 1997; White & Frederiksen, 1998; Zaraza & Fisher, 1999).”

“Others (e.g. Miller et al. 1999; White and Frederiksen 1998; Guruswamy et al. 1997) have demonstrated that students are able to improve understanding of principles such as forces between charged particles and conduction when they are provided with the opportunity to interact with…”

“In general, development of meta-cognitive knowledge can be encouraged by a teaching strategy of applying the same practices on several scientific content areas, along with reflection on the practice (Ben-David & Zohar, 2009 ; White & Frederiksen, 1998 ).”

“Studies have shown that increased metacognitive activity leads to improved learning (Bielaczyc et al., 1995; White and Frederiksen, 1998), and a variety of techniques have been used effectively to promote metacognitive activity (Karelina and Etkina, 2007; Koch, 2001; Wade and Reynolds, 1989).”

“Work by White and Frederiksen (1998, 2000), for example, demonstrates the value of asking students to reflect on their learning during inquiry with physics simulations.”

“Teachers lack the confidence or the time to develop new teaching strategies geared to improve students’ understanding and use of the open inquiry process (Schauble, Klopfer, & Ragghavan 1991; White & Frederiksen, 1998 ).”

“…carried out in the context of the development of students’ inquiry skills, because carrying out inquiry is a complex task that requires reflective thinking to understand the total inquiry process (Kuhn, Black, Keselman, & Kaplan, 2000; White & Frederiksen, 1998; Zion, Michalsky, & Mevarech, 2005).”

“…the importance of students in all academic domains acquiring higher-order thinking skills (Levine & Ornstein, 1993; Newmann, 1988; Pogrow, 1988; 1996; White & Frederiksen, 1998) and the literature is abundant with cases of teaching to promote higher-order thinking skills (e.g., Barak et al., 2007).”

“Students learn new skills better when they are explicitly articulated, demonstrated, and practiced (Labudde, Reif, & Quinn, 1988; Palincsar & Brown, 1984; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“In Thinkertools (White, 1993; White & Frederiksen, 1998) students conduct experiments both in the real world and within a microworld to develop and refine conceptual models relating force and motion.”

“…students with complex problems, similar to the kinds of problems they will face in their future profession, makes learning situations more similar to real-life, professional situations, which, consequently, would promote transfer of knowledge (Mayer & Wittrock, 1996; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“White and Frederiksen (1998) created a cyclical representation of the inquiry process that informed the design and use of the ThinkerTools simulations and curriculum activities.”

“The regulation of cognitive processes can facilitate learning and can lead to better achievement (Hogan et al. 1999; Zimmerman and Schunk 1989) in different domains (Schunk and Zimmerman 1994), such as science (White and Frederiksen 1998).”

“The ways teachers organize activity and discourse in their classrooms has profound effects on how students come to understand science (Lemke, 1990; Roseberry, Warren, & Courant, 1992; Stodolsky, 1988; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“inquiry-type teaching for low-achieving students (Boaler, 2002; Boaler & Staples, 2008; Schoenfeld, 2002; White & Frederiksen, 1998; Zohar & Dori, 2003).”

“White and Frederiksen (1998) support critical reflection on students’ inquiry process in their ThinkerTools curriculum by offering sets of assessment criteria (called the Reflective Assessment Process) as a tool that students can use to evaluate their investigations, individually or with peers.”

“…from a range of educational research revealing how inquiry-based instruction can provide meaningful opportunities for science learning (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 1999; Krajcik et al. 2000; Kyle, Bonnstetter, and Gadsden 1988; Kyle, Shymansky, and Alport 1982; White and Frederiksen 1997, 1998).”

“For instance, White and Frederiksen ( 1998 ) showed that students learning with an inquiry approach improved significantly on physics as well as inquiry assessments.”

“There are similar learning environments such as the CIRCSIM-Tutor (Hume, Michael, Rovick, & Evans, 1996) that provides students with prompts to aid their reXection triggered by their errors in a one-on-one tutoring environment, and the Thinker Tools (White & Frederiksen, 1998) that provides students with prompts to he…”

“The Thinkertools environment (White & Frederiksen, 1998) provides an even less directive scaffold focusing on the process of drawing conclusions in light of obtained experimental findings.”

“• Embed the use of these software tools in constructivist curricular approaches such as the Learning Cycle (Karplus, 1980) or the Inquiry Cycle ( White & Frederiksen, 1998 ).”

“…Jackson et al., 1996; Mandinach and Cline, 1994; Mellar et al., 1994; Roberts et al., 1983; Repenning, 1994; Shore et al., 1992; Smith et al., 1994; White and Frederiksen, 1998; Wilensky, 1997; Wilensky and Resnick, 1999; Wilensky and Reisman, in press; Stieff and Wilensky, 2003), there remains…”

“Many studies in the literature indicate that reflecting plays a significant role in constructing knowledge and improving learning (Barnert, 2006; Chen, Wei, Wu, & Uden, 2009; Kızılkaya, 2009; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“…can engage in sophisticated scientific meaning making when provided generative tasks, appropriate materials, and facilitative instruction (e.g., Lehrer, Schauble, Strom, & Pligge, 2001; Penner, 2000; Schauble, Glaser, Duschl, Schulze, & John, 1995; vanZee, 2000, White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“[2, 9, 10] However, non-STEM majors may enter the classroom with a disadvantage not necessarily shared by their self-selecting science major peers.”

“In past work the Coherence Score has been the most sensitive score for revealing instructional effects (White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Some evidence for incorporating self‐evaluation comes from the ThinkerTools curriculum (White, 1993 ; White & Frederickson, 1998 ).”

“Focusing on a process including scaffolded inquiry, reflection, and generalization, White and Frederiksen (1998) found no gender differences in the effects of the scaffolding process, but reported that inquiry learning can reduce the gap between more and less proficient students in their…”

“…Sandoval & Reiser, 2004), creating situations in which ELL (English language learner) students can work with peers in their first language (Walqui & Van Lier, 2010), and prompts to select from particular strategies to represent data to others (e.g., Derry et al., 2006; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Previous studies showed that metacognitive skills have a positive influence on performing scientific inquiry (White and Frederiksen 1998).”

“reflective self-assessment activities scaffolded by the OLM can significantly enhance students’ learning outcomes, similar to the paper-based support in White and Frederiksen [12].”

“Different versions of these inquiry cycles have been specified by scholars, many of whom have created their own inquiry cycle (e.g. de Jong, 2006a; Kuhn & Pease, 2008; Lim, 2004; National Research Council, 1996; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“These problems serve as a challenge to students’ reasoning or problemsolving skills and as an organizer for their learning (Voss & Post, 1988; White & Frederiksen, 1998 ).”

“The research of White and Frederiksen (1998) found, for example , positive impacts from reflective assessments aimed toward helping students monitor their learning and understanding of science content in their Thinker Tools curricula.”

“…studies focusing on support provided by digital tools intended to enhance students’ reflection of science concepts and the process of inquiry have documented positive effects in the form of gains in inquiry skills and conceptual understanding (de Jong 2006; White and Frederiksen 1998).”

“IMPROVE’s effect on lower and higher achievers’ problem solving and metacognitive strategy use extends previous findings of other metacognitive support programs in different age development as elementary students (Cardelle-Elawar 1995; Desoete & Roeyers, 2002; Fuchs et al., 2004; White & Frederiksen, 1998, 2000 ) and…”

“Metacognitive prompting is frequently used to remediate learners’ metacognition (Pifarre & Cobos, 2010; White & Frederiksen, 1998, 2005; Zimmerman, 2002) and/or inquiry practices (Quintana et al., 2005).”

“Research indicates that high quality classroom assessment, particularly high quality formative assessment, is associated with improved student achievement (Bergan, Sladeczek, Schwarz, & Smith; 1991; Black & Wiliam, 1998; Butler & Winne, 1995; Kingston & Nash, 2011; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Finally, when inquiry-based instruction has been instituted over a long time within a well-designed framework for instruction, it has been shown to be effective in improving students’ qualitative conceptual knowledge (White & Frederiksen, 1998).”