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

“It is believed that building such qualitative mental models lays the foundation for students’ development of a more scientific, abstract understanding of electric field models (White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“White and Frederiksen (1998) used science inquiry simulations to enhance this attribute.”

“The researchers introduced research that suggests developing questions can help students deepen their understanding of inquiry and learn to question beliefs and evidence for beliefs (White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“…is highly beneficial for low-achieving students (BenDavid & Zohar, 2008; Cardelle-Elawar, 1995; Kramarski, Mevarech, & Arami, 2002; Mevarech, 1999; Mevarech & Fridkin, 2006; Mevarech & Kramarski, 1997; Teong, 2003; White & Frederiksen, 1998, 2000; Zohar & Ben-David, 2008; Zohar & Peled, 2008).”

“In the seminal study on reflective assessment, White and Frederiksen (1998) provided students scientific Knowledge Building and Reflective Assessment for Low Achievers inquiry criteria for peer assessment to help them improve their metacognition and found below-average students gained more in…”

“…practices, in general, have been linked to increased student learning (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2003; Black & Wiliam, 1998; White & Frederiksen, 1998), and in studies of teachers’ attention to students’ thinking specifically, both the responsive teaching literature in…”

“White and Frederiksen [2] also propose a”

“A comparatively less structured inquiry model is that developed by White and Frederiksen (1998), who defined an inquiry cycle composed of the steps “question—predict—experiment—model—apply” for students’ reflective assess - ment activities.”

“This result is in agreement with other studies investigating students’ learning gain from work with computer-based learning environments that diminish cognitive load (Lajoi, 1993; Lajoi et al. , 1998, 2001, White and Frederiksen, 1998, Mayer and Moreno, 2003).”

“In order for learners to use metacognitive strategies to enhance their learning, they need to be aware of their own learning tendencies and control their learning (Conner, 2006; White & Frederiksen, 1998; Winne, 1995).”

“In so doing, several learning mechanisms are called into play: knowledge is made explicit, new knowledge is co-elaborated, and interpretations of data are employed as evidence in relation to claims and positions ( Baker, 2004 , cited in Andriessen, 2006 ; White & Frederiksen, 1998 ).”

“Computer simulations are found to be effective in helping novices in learning science by providing opportunities for users to explore science concepts at their own pace (Penuel et al. 2006; White and Frederiksen 1998; Wu et al. 2001).”

“The SCI-WISE system is based on the successes of the ThinkerTools inquiry cycle and curriculum (e.g., White & Frederiksen, 1998) and is intended to help students acquire inquiry skills through experimentation that is more epistemologically authentic (Chinn & Malhotra, in press).”

“…social environments to provide support for metacognitive activities, such as reflection, self-assessment, and revision (e.g., Lin, 2001; Lin, Hmelo, Kinzer, & Secules, 1999; Vye, Schwartz, Bransford, Barron, Zech, & The Cognition and Technology Group at Vanderbilt, 1998; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“…learn science (Hughes, 2004; Jenkins, 1996), engender attitudes and dispositions associated with those of autonomous and self-motivated learners (Deboer 2002; Reid & Yang, 2002), and improve students’ thinking and learning capabilities (Duggan & Gott, 2002; Haigh, 2003; White & Fredericksen, 1998).”

“…that the ambitious instructional context represented by Web-based inquiry science teaching has unique opportunities for and might even benefit educationally disadvantaged students when appropriate scaffolding is provided (Palincsar, Magnusson, Collins, & Cutter, 2001; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“of models (e.g. Stratford et al. 1998; White and Frederiksen 1998; Sins et al. 2009) or Epistemological Issues Concerning Computer Simulations 913”

“White and Frederiksen (1998) have also shown that metacognitive activities can specifically help lower-achieving students, which may explain the observed disproportionate effect of concurrent enrollment on final grades that depends on students’ placement exam scores.”

“Since the literature suggests that monitoring learning is important for inquiry learning (Sandoval and Reiser 2004; White and Frederiksen 1998), we added one reflective question in each step of the inquiry to facilitate ongoing reflection during the investigation in LPT3 (Appendix 1 — LPT3).”

“Many teachers however, either do not fully understand the inquiry process or do not have confidence or the time to develop new teaching strategies geared to develop students’ understanding and use of the inquiry process (Schauble et al., 1991; White and Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Most importantly, sharing, evaluating, and reflecting enable students to develop metacognitive skills (such as planning, reflecting, evaluating, and regulating) and thus learn how to learn (White & Frederiksen, 1998; Yang, 2019; Yang et al., 2016).”

“It also gives an understanding of how the inquiry process may be organised, which is particularly important for students in primary education who have little experience with scientific inquiry (Donovan, Bransford & Pellegrino, 1999; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Preservice teachers then chose from among five modeling tools to review and evaluate, including ThinkerTools TM (force-and-motion; White & Frederiksen, 1998; http://thinkertools.soe.berkeley.edu/), Model-it TM (relation-based; Spitulnik et al., 1999), Archimedes & Beyond TM (matter; Smith, Snir, &…”

“…questions is important in problem-solving procedures (CuccioSchirripa & Steiner, 2000), because it usually represents the start of the research process (Bell et al., 2005), the pursuit of which advances and extends knowledge on a certain topic (Chin & Osborne, 2008; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Further, teachers remain largely unable to implement the strategies developed and tested over the last few decades that inform and guide effective learning (Black and Wiliam 1998; Bransford et al. 2000; Donovan and Bransford 2005; White and Frederiksen 1998).”

“Other researchers have also focused on the metacognitive processes of monitoring one’s performance and progress, to check for errors or evaluate level of understanding (Flavell, 1979; Palinscar & Brown, 1984; Pintrich, 2004; Schoenfeld, 1983; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Computational modeling has supported science learning and CT learning (Arastoopour Irgens et al., 2020; Aslan et al., 2020; Buckley et al., 2004; Klopfer, 2003; Schwarz et al., 2007; White & Frederiksen, 1998; Wilkerson-Jerde e t al., 2015).”

“Providing students with opportunities to mentor others can also help them learn by developing meta-cognitive knowledge and skills, that is, students “learn how to learn” [3, 34].”

“…students work together and contribute equally in heterogeneous inquiry-based activities and the burden of all the work does not fall on one student (White & Frederiksen, 1998), (b) enabling the teacher to provide more time to assist student partnerships based on their levels of need (Menesses &…”

“…or modeling-based instruction (MBI) in science education (Buckley, 2000; Cheng & Brown, 2010; Gilbert & Boutler, 2000; Gobert, 2000; Johnstone & Mahmoud, 1981; Louca & Zacharia, 2012; Roth, Woszczyna, Smith, Universiq, & Va, 1996; Shen, Lei, Chang, & Namdar, 2014; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Moreover, thinking in terms of concrete practical steps does no justice to the more conceptual aspects of doing research (Kirschner, 1992; Gott & Duggan, 1996; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Research has shown that technology-enhanced visualizations have the potential to advance learning in science disciplines such as physics (e.g., White & Frederiksen, 1998), chemistry (e.g., Dori, Sasson, Kaber-man, & Herscovitz, 2004), earth science (e.g., Edelson, Gordin, & Pea, 1999; Kolod-ner et…”

“Over the past 10 years, many researchers have developed computer-based modeling tools to support elementary and secondary school students in scientific modeling (e.g., Mandinach, 1989; Resnick, 1996; Schwarz, 1998; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Although the research studies suggested that male students outperform female students in physics (e.g., Yıldırım & Eryılmaz, 1999), in the present study, young men demonstrated significantly lower scores than young women in physics achievement with respect to the direct relation in the model.”

“Even more encouraging is that academically weak students are found to benefit from metacognitive training ( White & Frederiksen, 1998 ).”

“In our work, we view explanation‐driven inquiry as the means to learn, do, and teach science, a view which is supported by extensive literature in science teaching and learning (Anderson, 2002 ; Chinn & Malhotra, 2002 ; Donovan & Bransford, 2005 ; NRC, 1996 ; White & Frederiksen, 1998 ).”

“…et al 1994; Jackson et al 1996; Mandinach & Cline 1994; Mellar et al 1994; Roberts et al 1983; Repenning 1994; Shore et al 1992; Smith et al 1994; White & Frederiksen 1998; Wilensky, 1997; Wilensky & Resnick, in press), there remains significant lack of consensus about the proper role of…”

“White and Frederiksen (1998) developed the ThinkerTools curriculum that consisted of an iterative activity sequence ‘‘question—predict—experiment— model—apply’’ for physics with an emphasis on students’ reflective assessment on their inquiry activities.”

“…or learning (Engle & Conant, 2002), and are engaged in mathematical practices like questioning, reasoning, and generalizing. n a seminal study, White and Frederiksen (1998) showed that teaching students learning practices in science and giving hem time to reflect upon them led to remarkable…”

“A number of studies have shown that inquiry learning stimulates students’ active engagement in learning processes that require metacognition to monitor understanding (e.g. Khosa & Volet, 2014; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“By adopting and later expanding the approach of White and Frederiksen (1998) model of an inquiry cycle, we devised a coding scheme that fits our research.”

“White and Frederiksen (1998), on the other hand, suggested that pupils should be told explicitly by teachers what the criteria of success will be.”

“These findings are consistent with prior research that has examined KB inquiry and reflective assessment (Raes, Schellens, & De Wever, 2014; White & Frederiksen, 1998; Yang et al. , 2016, 2019).”

“The overall conclusion of the study is that prompting reflection is effective for all students, but that 'low-achieving' students can benefit especially from these types of prompts (White & Frederiksen 1998, p. 51).”

“Students know much less than scientists and need more mentoring, and a knowledge creation culture does not generally pre‐exist in classrooms (White & Frederiksen, 1998 ); scientific communities evolve more than classes of students (Barab, Kling, & Gray, 2004 ), and scientists tend to be concerned with the day‐to‐day d…”

“Based on John Dewey’s philosophy that IBL begins with the curiosity of learners, several authors (White and Frederiksen, 1998, Bruce and Bishop, 2002) suggest a 5-step cycle of inquiry, as shown in Figure 1.”

“Self-regulation is the ability of an individual to monitor and regulate their own processes in order to adapt individual behaviors to specific external conditions (Boekarts, 1996; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“…epistemological beliefs can further communicate and debate problem explanations or problem solutions during the inquiry process, reflect on their inquiry process and what they have learned, and attribute reasons for their success or failure (Alake-Tuenter et al., 2012; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“Online learning provides excellent opportunities for students to propose, support, evaluate, critique, and re fi ne ideas productively (Hand, Norton-Meier, Staker, & Bintz, 2009; Wenning, 2005; White & Frederiksen, 1998).”

“For example, students can examine and explore basic physics by constructing kinetic models using the ThinkerTools software package ( White and Frederikson, 1998 ), construct models that represent the factors that influence ecosystems and water quality (Stratford, 1997; Stratford et al., 1998), and build computational…”

“The reflective support led to positive effects in conceptual knowledge acquisition (White and Frederiksen 1998).”

“While such approaches have proven useful in a variety of scientific domains (Opfer et al. 2012; White and Frederickson 1998), the potential biases intrinsic to these types of assessment tasks have not been explored in many domains.”