| Chapter 2: | Background Study |
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challenging other students to support their findings with evidence. These activities closely mirror what scientists do at scientific conferences when papers are presented.
Research Finding 5: Effective learning requires that students take control of their own learning. Students must develop the ability to think about their thinking—metacognition. This is needed in order to self-evaluate whether or not they have enough evidence or information to state a claim or to accept others’ scientific claims. Metacognition requires the student to monitor and regulate their own thinking processes.
Research Finding 6: The ability to apply knowledge to novel situations, that is, transfer of learning, is affected by the degree to which students learn with understanding. Teachers must provide the time for students to make meaningful connections in their learning. This includes multiple ways of learning about concepts, and providing tasks that are challenging but not overly frustrating. Lastly, application of learning to a new situation helps to solidify the students’ understanding.
These research findings support the pedagogy of students learning about science by doing science-type activities. Posing questions, considering prior research, planning a procedure to try to answer questions, gathering and organizing data, analyzing data, creating claims about data based upon evidence and communication of the claims are all part of what the teacher has students do when they are learning through an inquiry process.
Although inquiry is many times synonymously used with the term problem-solving, it should be noted that inquiry is not always specific to the solving of a problem. In science, scientists use both basic science and applied science. Basic science is typically termed as the pursuit of investigating questions for the sole reason of wanting to know. Applied science more strictly aligns itself with the application of basic science concepts in