The reflection for this week is about the Scientific Inquiry. According to Schwartz, Lederman & Crawford (2003), scientific inquiry includes students centered projects, is constructed with daily practice, and provide students with a great opportunity to have social construction and understanding of concepts and phenomena. Basically, the scientific inquiry has a close relationship with the process used by scientists to study the world and give an explanation of certain phenomena, the explanation they give is mainly derived from their observations.
Translated to the educational field the scientific inquiry is a scientific process that provides students with questions and suggests methods to understand and discover relationships in different phenomena. Using the scientific inquiry can help students to also more accurate critical thinking competence, discover real science, be aware of the research process, etc.
The Scientific inquiry process is the result of some findings from the NRC that include the following:
1. understanding science is more than knowing facts, this finding shows us the process in which scientists make connections between their conceptual frameworks.
2. Students build new knowledge and understand based on what they already know and believe, it means that students can have experience in scientific phenomena and its process to build new explanations.
3. Students formulate new knowledge by modifying and refining their current concepts, it means that by using the scientific inquiry students can find better ways to answer questions and to finally explain certain events or facts.
4. Learning is mediated by the social environment, it means that the scientific inquiry is richer when students share and realize different aspects by socializing findings.
5. Effective learning requires students taking control of their own learning, it means that students should identify the different phases of a project to be able to decide the different types of evidence they need.
6. The ability to apply knowledge to novel situations is affected by the degree that students learn with understanding, when students find tasks and assignments useful they can appreciate how they increase their skill level.
The whole process of scientific inquiry allows students to be engaged, collect evidence to answer questions, create and formulate explanations based on the collected evidence, evaluate their explanations in light of their scientific understanding, communicate and justify explanations. If one of these phases is missing, the scientific inquiry process is described as partial. It is necessary to apply all the phases to have scientific inquiry project.
I consider this educational approach as ideal, I would like to use it in a proposal to help students to better understand daily life events like pollution or the increasing number of technological waste. I think that the method can be effective addressing a new understanding of the problem and find plausible solutions for students. When students have the opportunity to make research on their own is more feasible to have significant learning and critical thinking that results in different behaviors. In that proposal I would like to answer questions like: What are the effects of technological waste in your community? What can you do to help the environment?
About the scientific inquiry model, I would like to know if someone has used it in other disciplines but science, like social sciences. I find the process pretty related with the research method, but I am not sure that can be applied using the same methodical process.
References:
Bybee,
R., Bloom, M., Phillips, J., & Knapp, N. (2005). Doing Science: The process
of Scientific Inquiry. Center for
Curriculum Development. Colorado Springs, CO.
Schwartz,
R., Lederman, N., & Crawford, B. (2003). Developing views of nature of
science in an authentic context: An explicit approach to bridging the gap
between nature of science and scientific inquiry. Science Teacher Education,
88(4), 610–645. https://doi.org/10.1002/sce.10128
Hola Diana,
ResponderEliminarLoved your summary on the report. I agree with your idea for a proposal as I would like to see these matters facing technological waste or "e-waste" as mentioned by some researchers of this topic. This is an excellent topic to attempt this and is one that we are looking into in our engineering class in light of a guest speaker who was discussing the millions of pounds of e-waste being illegally traffic to other parts of the world. Do you think that this method can help us take care of this problem locally? This is an issue that we as a nation are reason for it.
Diana, I agree with the statement that you made in regards to all phases need to be applied in science inquiry. I feel at science inquiry allows students through a combination of his arm activities combined with peer discussion, self-reflection and critical thinking allows students to flow through the different phases required to fully enveloped science inquiry. I also appreciate your comment about science inquiry being able to help students better understand daily life events such as local environmental problems as well as the effects that man is having on the world overall work in local communities. You mentioned that you thought this could be used in other disciplines such as social science. You think this could be adapted to areas such as social studies or English language arts?
ResponderEliminarDiana,
ResponderEliminarI like all the connections you have made on the scientific inquiry process. I do agree that in the educational field scientific inquiry provides students with questions and methods to understand/discover relationships. I particularly like your suggestion on the proposal idea you made on using scientific inquiry for students to understand daily life events such as pollution or technology waste. That is very interesting. Would you use be using the scientific inquiry process in your future academia? I would definitely use it throughout my teaching career because it ensures that students build on their experiences to learn new concepts, accessing conceptual change.