William Sandoval

Recent standards for science education have called for students to engage in inquiry, defined as a set of interrelated processes used to ask questions about the natural world and investigate them. An important issue for educators and researchers who would implement inquiry-based instruction is to understand what the product of such inquiry processes should be. I argue that framing scientific inquiry as investigation for the purpose of developing explanations, especially causal explanations, provides a meaningful context for the development of inquiry process skills and represents a fundamental goal for scientific inquiry. To provide students with support for such inquiry requires extending prior research into scientific thinking skills. I have developed a model of inquiry as the coordination of argumentive and investigative knowledge, and used this model as the basis for the design of an inquiry-based curriculum for evolutionary biology. This design situates software supports for investigation and explanation construction within a curricular framework that exploits students' explanations as objects of reflection and discussion. An empirical study of this design showed how the curricular framework and software worked together to foster students' attention to argumentive goals leading to planful investigation in this domain, but exposed shortcomings in students' performances such as a lack of evidence cited for explanations and ineffective evaluation of explanations. These shortcomings motivated revisions to the design. A subsequent study of the revised design showed improvement in students' use of data in their explanations, and that students learned to make fewer unwarranted causal claims as a result of the curriculum. Together these studies suggest that structuring inquiry around specific goals for explanations, that they articulate causal mechanisms and are supported by data, fosters students' planful investigation of complex phenomena and supports their construction and evaluation of explanations as artifacts of scientific knowledge.

Inquiry-based science teaching demands a set of teaching practices quite different from typical didactic science instruction. Two of the central challenges in teaching science through inquiry are that a) students' inquiry must productively engage them in exploration and reasoning about central issues in the domain; and b) students need to be able to generalize such specific inquiry experiences to broader, formal domain theories. These challenges reflect a tension in inquiry-based science learning between students' ...

Abstract Following their participation in a guided-inquiry unit, 129 seventh-graders from five diverse urban middle schools were asked about their perceptions of specific inquiry tasks, from an expectancy-value framework. Students were asked to rate the interest value, utility value, and task difficulty of (a) data collection design;(b) explanation;(c) data analysis; and (d) citing evidence for claims. The utility of all tasks was rated highly, while interest ratings were moderate.

Laboratories have been a feature of science education for more than a century, yet their value has been debated many times over. What do students really get out of laboratory activities in their science classes? Are they necessary components of good science instruction? How can labs be improved? In 2004, the National Science Foundation asked the National Research Council to provide a definitive answer to these questions.

Andrew Elby (this issue) argues that researchers in the field of personal epistemology should beware insistence on a narrow definition of epistemology to guide this work. His argument is a response to suggestions (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; Sandoval, 2005) that the study of personal epistemology should focus on people's views about knowledge and knowing and not conflate those with views about learning.

Andrew Elby (this issue) argues that researchers in the field of personal epistemology should beware insistence on a narrow definition of epistemology to guide this work. His argument is a response to suggestions (Hofer & Pintrich, 1997; Sandoval, 2005) that the study of personal epistemology should focus on people's views about knowledge and knowing and not conflate those with views about learning.

ABSTRACT A long standing goal of science education in the United States has been that students develop an understanding of the nature of science, of what scientific knowledge is like and how it is constructed. Despite this interest, students continue to leave secondary schools with naïve views of the nature of science. Current science education reforms advocate inquiry as a way for students to learn about the nature of science as well as scientific concepts.

This paper explores how two teachers concurrently enacting the same technology-based inquiry unit on evolution structured activity and discourse in their classrooms to connect students' computer-based investigations to formal domain theories. Our analyses show that the teachers' interactions with their students during inquiry were quite similar, and each teacher used whole-class discussions as a major vehicle for connecting students' understanding to formal domain theories.