Individual Differences in Children’s Development of Scientific Reasoning Through Inquiry-Based Instruction: Who Needs Additional Guidance?

Abstract

Scientific reasoning involves a person's ability to think and act in ways that help advance their understanding of the natural world. Young children are naturally inclined to engage in scientific reasoning and display an emerging competence in the component skills of, for example, hypothesizing, experimenting and evaluating evidence. Developmental psychology research has shown that same-age children often differ considerably in their proficiency to perform these skills. Part of this variation comes from individual differences in cognition; another part is due to the fact that the component skills of scientific reasoning emerge at a different age and mature at a different pace. Significantly less attention has been paid to children's capacity to improve in scientific reasoning through instruction and deliberate practice. Although elementary science lessons are generally effective to raise the skill level of a group of learners, not all children benefit equally from the instructional treatment they receive. Knowing what causes this differential effectiveness is important as it can inform the design of adaptive instruction and support. The present study therefore aimed to identify and explain how fifth-graders (N = 138) improve their scientific reasoning skills over the course of a 5-week inquiry-based physics unit. In line with our expectations, significant progress was observed in children's achievements on a written scientific reasoning test, which was administered prior to and after the lessons, as well as in their responses to the questions and assignments that appeared on the worksheets they filled out during each lesson. Children's reading comprehension and mathematical skillfulness explained a portion of the variance in children's pretest-posttest gain. As these overall results did not apply equally to all component skills of scientific reasoning, we recommend science teachers to adapt their lessons based on children's past performance in reading and math and their actual performance of each scientific reasoning skill. The orchestration and relative effectiveness of both adaptive science teaching approaches is an interesting topic for future research.

Patterns of Development in Children’s Scientific Reasoning: Results from a Three-Year Longitudinal Study

“…Finally, developmental patterns in scientific reasoning were predicted to resemble those in reading comprehension and math. Although these pattern matches have not been examined before, reading and math growth is often nonlinear (Scammacca, Fall, Capin, Roberts, & Swanson, 2020) and might correspond with the hypothesized nonlinear developmental patterns in scientific reasoning because performance of these skills is consistently related during the elementary years (e.g., Koerber & Osterhaus, 2019;Schlatter et al, 2020).…”

“…Another reason is that reading comprehension requires linguistic inferencing, which is also involved in scientific reasoning -for instance to create a mental representation of the inquiry process or experimental outcomes (Van der Graaf et al, 2018;Van de Sande et al, 2019). Mathematical skillfulness also correlates with scientific reasoning (Koerber & Osterhaus, 2019;Kuntze, 2004;Schlatter, Molenaar, & Lazonder, 2020;Tajudin & Chinnappan, 2015). This relationship likely exists because number sense and basic arithmetic operations in particular are needed to interpret numerical data (e.g., to recognize and calculate a pattern in scores) and evaluate data characteristics (e.g., to identify outliers).…”

Efficacy of Inquiry-Based and “Cookbook” Labs at Human Physiology Lessons at University Level - Is There an Impact in Relation to Acquirement of New Knowledge and Skills?

“…On the other hand, it is obvious that the students with better knowledge of scientific content can apply their knowledge into practice more easily and design the correct procedure of an experiment. Some students need only little support and they are able to improve their scientific skills, but other students need some specific guidance from the teacher (Schlatter, Molenaar, & Lazonder, 2020).This guidance could be increased in relation to skills that are particularly difficult to learn, such as hypothesizing or designing one's own experiment (Schlatter, Molenaar, & Lazonder, 2020). These steps were also very difficult for students in our study, but based on the guidance provided during first lessons and the feedback received from the teacher, students improved their ability to formulate the hypothesis and they were able to do it on their own at later lessons.…”

Prompting Socially Shared Regulation of Learning and Creativity in Solving STEM Problems

“…As noted above, STEM studies encompass an extensive range of activities and processes, such as problem-solving and idea generation, which mutually promote and benefit from creativity (Al-Abdali and Al-Balushi, 2016 ; Schlatter et al, 2020 ). Several studies show a positive effect of training on scientific creativity.…”