Inquiry-based science education (IBSE) has been promoted as an inspiring way of learning science by engaging pupils in designing and conducting their own scientific investigations. For primary school teachers, the open nature of IBSE poses challenges as they often lack experience in supporting their pupils during the different phases of an open IBSE project, such as formulating a research question and designing and conducting an investigation. The current study aims to meet these challenges by presenting a pedagogical framework in which four domains of scientific knowledge are addressed in seven phases of inquiry. The framework is based on video analyses of pedagogical interventions by primary school teachers participating in open IBSE projects. Our results show that teachers can guide their pupils successfully through the process of open inquiry by explicitly addressing the conceptual, epistemic, social and/or procedural domain of scientific knowledge in the subsequent phases of inquiry. The paper concludes by suggesting further research to validate our framework and to develop a pedagogy for primary school teachers to guide their pupils through the different phases of open inquiry. IntroductionInquiry-based science education (IBSE) is regarded as an inspiring way of learning science as it focuses on pupils' own interests and stimulates active learning by enabling pupils to conduct their own investigations (Braund & Driver, 2005;Murphy & Beggs, 2003;Rocard et al., 2007). Since addressing pupils' motivation and own interests positively influences their achievements (Tella, 2007), IBSE is viewed as an effective approach for learning scientific concepts and understanding the nature of science (NOS) in which the process of inquiry is key.The pedagogy of IBSE allows pupils to develop their conceptual understanding of scientific phenomena (Minner, Levy, & Century, 2010;Schroeder, Scott, Tolson, Huang, & Lee, 2007) and their inquiry skills, such as formulating a research question (Zion, Cohen, & © 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.CONTACT Martina S. J. van Uum m.vanuum@science.ru.nl Science Education Hub Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SCIENCE EDUCATION, 2016 VOL. 38, NO. 3, 450-469 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09500693.2016 Amir, 2007). Moreover, pupils learn about the way scientific knowledge is constructed (Khishfe & Abd-El-Khalick, 2002) and develop an image of the social practice of scientists (Mercer, Dawes, Wegerif, & Sams, 2004). IBSE has been suggested to positively affect learning outcomes of students by means of enabling open inquiries (Berg, ...

This paper describes a multiple case study on open inquiry-based learning in primary schools. During open inquiry, teachers often experience difficulties in balancing support and transferring responsibility to pupils' own learning. To facilitate teachers in guiding open inquiry, we developed hard and soft scaffolds. The hard scaffolds consisted of documents with explanations and/or exercises regarding difficult parts of the inquiry process. The soft scaffolds included explicit references to and additional explanations of the hard scaffolds. We investigated how teacher implementation of these scaffolds contributed to pupils' selfdirected learning during open inquiry. Four classes of pupils, aged 10-11, were observed while they conducted an inquiry lesson module of about 10 lessons in their classrooms. Data were acquired via classroom observations, audio recordings, and interviews with teachers and pupils. The results show that after the introduction of the hard scaffolds by the teacher, pupils were able and willing to apply them to their investigations. Combining hard scaffolds with additional soft scaffolding promoted pupils' scientific understanding and contributed to a shared guidance of the inquiry process by the teacher and her pupils. Our results imply that the effective use of scaffolds is an important element to be included in teacher professionalisation.

This paper reports a pretest-posttest study about the impact of a teacher professional development (TPD) programme on primary school teachers’ knowledge of and attitude towards inquiry-based learning. A pedagogical framework of inquiry phases and domains of scientific knowledge combined with hard and soft scaffolds formed the basis for the TPD programme. A total of 59 teachers were divided between the experimental group, which participated in the TPD programme, and a control group. We measured the teachers’ subject matter knowledge (SMK) of the conceptual, epistemic, social, and procedural domain before and after the TPD programme by means of different questionnaires. In addition, we measured their knowledge of how to support their pupils during the inquiry process (PCK) and their attitude towards inquiry-based learning. The results show that our TPD programme improved teachers’ conceptual and social SMK, PCK, and attitude. Our study implicates that scaffolding different domains of scientific knowledge during the inquiry cycle is a valuable component of TPD in inquiry-based learning.

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