This post was edited by Rebecca Widing on Nov, 2006
1. Reflect on Duschl and Grandy's notion of inquiry in relation to your personal experiences both as a student and as a teacher.

I think there needs to be a balance between doing the traditional classroom lab work and the “new” data analysis. In the traditional classroom, the activities modeled around “Here’s the lab report, follow the instructions, everyone comes up with the same answer” is important so students learn how to use the tools and how to follow a procedure. This gives students a model of how to complete a test. But, usually, the actual problem that is being solved in the lab/experiment is ignored by the students who just want to finish the task. So, it is important to place a much larger emphasis on looking at data and drawing independent conclusions. The availability of countless data makes incorporating this type of inquiry much easier.


2. Reflect on any one of the above trends in relation to your classroom teaching and the DataTools investigations that you are implementing (or will be implementing shortly.)

Trend: From an image of science education that emphasizes content and process goals to science education that stresses goals examining the relation between evidence and explanations.

In a recent DataTools-inspired activity in my classroom, we had a set of minerals that we had gone through the mineral identification lab with, but I wanted to tie this lab into a few other things, so each student had to find the density of just one of the minerals in the set. Then the students were given the data-set of all the minerals and had to graph the densities of the minerals, using Excel, of course. After doing this, in the conclusion questions, I asked them why they thought the densest minerals were the densest, hinting to review their chemical formulas. I also asked if there was a relationship between density and hardness (the mineral with the highest density in our set was galena, which is soft), which there wasn’t. It was very easy to see which students used the data they had and which students didn’t, but some kids just didn’t really know what to look at; they need opportunities to practice studying data and look for patterns and try to find evidence to support the patterns. The ultimate goal would be that the students look at the data, analyze, and ask questions about it on their own, resulting in coming up with their own conclusions about the data.

I appreciate your comments on having balance in the classroom with respect to traditional labs and using data sets. In addition, I am quite sure that both could be made part of a meaningful inquiry experience or both could be just stand alone lessons that may lack some of the qualities that make the inquiry approach so unique. If a teachers have such broad definitions of inquiry (at least they do at my school) it makes the converstation that much more difficult.

Becky, My experience with the students has been the same-they just want to finish the task without thinking deeply about the data. I have chosen the following example (attached file) to illustrate the point. I agree that we have to mix the Duschl learning with the classroom activities.

Our Excel experiences:

The magic genie, also known as ‘Excel’ spits out a chart for any data. The charts may be totally meaningless but the children tend to think that they have finished the job just because there is an end product. Since this end product is computer generated, it is taken for granted that the chart is the right thing. I want to share my initial simple project in Excel that involved planting depths of three different plants at depths of 5, 10 and 15 centimeters. Their growth above the ground was given to the students as 15, 8 and 4 centimeters respectively. I asked the children to show the relationship between the planting depth and the growth above ground.

Chart A is the initial work of a student and after many trials ‘chart C’ has been made. It takes time to make children understand that ‘chart A’ does not show the relationship between the planting depth and the growth of a specific plant.

The simplicity of the data initially gives the children the idea that it is ‘easily workable.’
However, the children need to change the planting depth measurements into negative numbers so these data points show below the zero level and make the graph meaningful.

Jayanthi,

Your Excel activity sounds like a good way to show the students that not every type graph will show you what you are looking for. It might also be a good introduction into an activity that demonstrates that data, depending on how it is presented, can be misleading...

Mark,my college and high school lab experiences reflect the traditional, highly structured type thatis, your results were expected to conform to the expectation of your instructor and were considered wrong if they did not( I suspect this approach produced a lot of "fudge").On the flip side, it seems difficult at times to assess , or evaluate the students' level of achievement in the process of inquiry.I think I'm trying to say it is a lot easier to grade based on the "rightness" of the answer, than on the actual quality of the inquiry itself.