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What This Means for Instruction
The National Science Education Standards and Ohio Science Academic Content
Standards stress how important it is for students to be able to conduct
scientific inquiry and to understand the nature of scientific inquiry. This
means that students should have opportunities to mesh scientific processes
with content knowledge while using scientific reasoning and critical thinking
to understand how and why scientific knowledge changes in response to new
evidence. The authors cited here offer the following suggestions:
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Implement scientific inquiry to improve learning outcomes and student
attitudes toward science. (Novak; Cruickshank & Olander; Berg, Bergendahl,
Lundberg & Tibell)
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Allow students to investigate according to their own interests to motivate
them to take ownership of their learning. (Vasquez; Llewellyn)
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Use scaffolding to introduce students to scientific inquiry and build
confidence in students' abilities to do science. (Flick)
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Implement a learning cycle pedagogy to provide a scaffold for student
learning, encouraging students to reconcile preconceptions with new,
conflicting data. (Minstrell and Stimpson; Gabel)
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Use evidence mapping to scaffold student inquiry and help students identify
how and why observations conflict with previously held beliefs. (Toth, Suthers
& Lesgold)
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Consider the intended learning outcomes when deciding how much guidance to
provide students in an inquiry activity. (National Research Council, 2000)
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Focus students on solving problems and examining relationships among variables
in an investigation to help fully develop inquiry skills. (Schauble, Klopfer &
Raghavan)
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