Identifying patterns and relationships among the responses of seventh-grade students to the science process skill of designing experiments

Abstract

The development of reasoning skills, higher-level thinking skills, and science process skills are some of the benefits students can realize by participating in inquiry in the science laboratory. We used student responses to the Alternative Assessment of Science Process Skills (AASPS) developed by the Missouri Department of Education and the Department of Educational Assessment to develop the Science Process Skills Inventory (SPSI). The SPSI was then used to analyze student efforts at writing experimental designs. Our goal was to gain insight into factors that may be related to students successfully designing experiments. The instrument guides teachers and researchers in assessing seven main components of experimental designs. Each component consists of elements unique to the specific laboratory exercise. Subsequent to its development, the instrument was used to score 364 student responses to the "design an experiment" portion of an alternative assessment instrument for science process skills. Results indicate that explicit, incremental development of the science process skills of formulating hypotheses and identifying variables, together with model examples, may be a means to facilitate student success in designing science experiments. Implications for the classroom and for research are discussed.

Investigation of the Effects of Inquiry Approach on Science Achievement in Distance Education

“…In the current study, it was concluded that the inquiry instruction method applied through distance education in a structure in which reading skills were statistically controlled increased the success of students in lower-order and higher-order thinking in science classes more than the traditional instruction method and this finding concurs with the literature (Saunders & Shepardson, 1987;Romance & Vitale, 1992;Germann, Aram & Burke, 1996;Köksal & Berberoğlu, 2012;Das, 2020). For example, Shymansky, Kyle, and Alport found that the inquiry instruction method significantly affected students' achievement in lower-order and higher-order thinking compared to the traditional instruction method and when these effects were analyzed across the subject areas, it was found that while the use of the inquiry instruction method in biology and physics teaching positively affected the students' achievement in lower-order and higher-order thinking, it did not show similar effects in astronomy and chemistry teaching (Shymansky, Kyle & Alport, 1983).…”

Assessment of Competencies in Scientific Inquiry Through the Application of Rasch Measurement Techniques

“…The lack of misfitting items provides evidence for the assertion that the items define a unidimensional trait. Additional types of validity were evaluated by considering item-difficulty order and comparing observed item-difficulty order to that which was observed and/or proposed in part in other studies (e.g., [31,32,36,37,41]. Generally, the pattern of item difficulty measure (Figure 3) matches that predicted by the literature theory review.…”

Differentiated Instruction Around the World. A Global Inclusive Insight

“…Conversely, the lower expressions of situational interest in the control group compared to experimental group I could be explained. It can be assumed that the lack of instructional support in the control group might be associated with an increased cognitive load for the learners during the evaluation of the experiment (Arnold et al, 2014;Germann et al, 1996). In this context, Schmidt et al (2019) have already shown that open experimentation can lead to an increased extrinsic cognitive load compared to experimentation with incremental scaffolds (Kirschner et al, 2006).…”