Metacognitive Facilitation: An Approach to Making Scientific Inquiry Accessible to All
B. White, J. Frederiksen 2000 American Association for the Advancement of Science. In J. Minstrell and E. van Zee (Eds.), Inquiring into Inquiry Learning and Teaching in Science (pp. 331-370).
The ThinkerTools Inquiry Curriculum focuses on facilitating the development of metacognitive knowledge and skills as students learn the inquiry processes needed to create and revise their theories. Instructional trials in urban classrooms revealed that this approach is highly effective in enabling all students to improve their performance on various inquiry and physics measures. The approach incorporates a reflective process in which students evaluate their own and each other's research using a set of criteria that characterize good inquiry, such as reasoning carefully and collaborating well. When this reflective process is included, the curriculum is particularly effective in reducing the performance gap between low and high achieving students. These findings have strong implications for what such inquiry-oriented, metacognitively-focused curricula can accomplish, particularly in urban school settings in which there are many disadvantaged students. Furthermore, the process of metacognitive facilitation can also be helpful to teachers as they learn how to engage in and reflect on inquiry teaching practices.
Subject: Education Resource Type: Pedagogic Resources:Research Results, Book Section Research on Learning: Instructional Design:Constructivism, Incorporating Research Experiences, Inquiry-Based Learning, Cognitive Domain:Metacognition, How information is organized, Ways Of Learning:Cooperative Learning, Instructional Design:Use of Technology
