Exploring Korean Middle School Students’ View about Scientific Inquiry

Abstract

The aim of this study is to examine Korean middle school students' view about scientific inquiry with the Views about Scientific Inquiry (VASI) questionnaire, an instrument that deals with eight aspects of scientific inquiry. 282 Korean middle school students participated in this study, and their responses were classified as informed, mixed, and naïve. The results revealed that Korean middle school students primarily held mixed or naïve views about scientific inquiry. To discover why students held these views, their responses were analyzed in detail. For instance, they did not understand the meaning of 'experiment', 'scientific', 'data', and 'evidence' well. They understood scientific terminology and scientific inquiry in everyday contexts. Students also tended to regard science process skill as scientific method. According to the results mentioned above, explicit and reflective instruction is necessary to develop students' views about scientific inquiry.

Coping with Challenges and Uncertainty in Scientific Research

“…Scientific inquiry is not the simple process of performing basic scientific tasks. It should combine various scientific methods such as reasoning and critical thinking with scientific information (Lederman, 2006;Senler, 2015;Yang et al, 2017). Detailed descriptions of how prospective scientists face various research-related problems in their laboratories and how they handle those problems have not been well studied.…”