Variable control and conceptual change: A large-scale quantitative study in elementary school

Abstract

We examined the predictive value and interplay of elementary school students' understanding of the control-of-variables strategy, a domain-general experimentation skill, and their prior content knowledge for subsequent conceptual knowledge acquisition and conceptual change. Trained teachers provided N = 1809 first to sixth graders with 15 lessons of guided inquiry-based instruction on floating and sinking. We assessed understanding of the control-of-variables strategy before instruction, and conceptual content knowledge from before to after instruction. A mixture model analysis, specifically, a latent transition analysis, indicates that understanding of the control-of-variables strategy predicts content knowledge structure before instruction, and content knowledge development from before to after instruction. These findings corroborate lab-based research on the interplay of experimentation skills and content knowledge in inquiry settings and extend it to teacher-guided classroom instruction. We describe how learning pathways vary depending on students' understanding of the control-of-variables strategy and prior content knowledge, and discuss implications for learning and instruction.

The relation between the control-of-variables strategy and content knowledge in physics in secondary school

“…Floating and sinking is a domain that is present in everyday life; children who already possess knowledge about CVS might be better equipped to learn about the causal relations underlying these phenomena. This assumption is supported by a recent study showing that first-to sixth-graders' knowledge of CVS is a substantial predictor of children's science content knowledge development when they receive inquiry-based education on floating and sinking (Edelsbrunner et al, 2018).…”

“…The current study examines when all four CVS sub-skills first emerge in secondary school, and how these skills are related to students' science content knowledge. Based on Schauble's (1990Schauble's ( , 1996 observational findings and correlational findings from childhood (van der Graaf et al, 2018;Wagensveld et al, 2015;Edelsbrunner et al, 2018), we expect a significant correlation between CVS and science content knowledge in secondary school that is independent of students' general reasoning abilities (see Koerber & Osterhaus, 2019). Adolescents' mastery of identification-and planning-tasks seems to fully emerge in adolescence (Bullock et al, 2009), and so we predict that secondary schoolers' achievement on these tasks will significantly improve in higher grades.…”

“…CVS is seen as a crucial skill that students need to possess in order to benefit from inquiry-based learning in science education (Abd-El-Khalick et al, 2004). Mastery of CVS contributes to successful inquiry learning, because it enables students to conduct their own informative experiments (Edelsbrunner, Schalk, Schumacher, & Stern 2018;Stender, Schwichow, Zimmerman, & Härtig, 2018). In addition, mastery of CVS is a prerequisite for the development of more advanced scientific-reasoning skills, such as multivariate causal reasoning and complex problem solving (Kuhn, Iordanou, Pease, & Wirkala, 2008;Wüstenberg, Greiff, & Funke, 2012;Zimmerman, 2000Zimmerman, , 2007.…”

Hands-On Exploration of Cubes’ Floating and Sinking Benefits Children’s Subsequent Buoyancy Predictions

“…What is new in this investigation of buoyancy explanations is the open-ended manner of analysis. Past studies have assigned children to particular explanation types in a hierarchy from least to most advanced (Franse et al, under review) coded the complexity level of children's explanations (Tenenbaum et al, 2004;Rappolt-Schlichtmann et al, 2007) or examined explanation profiles on the basis of answers to multiple choice buoyancy questions designed to reflect previously identified concepts (Schneider and Hardy, 2013;Edelsbrunner et al, 2018). Here coding all of the content of what children said and analyzing this with LCAs meant that we did not need a priori hierarchies or expected concepts, allowing us to discover relations in all that children say (see also van der Maas and Straatemeier, 2008).…”

“…Whereas several studies have extensively investigated the longitudinal learning effects of mixed-method, long-term buoyancy interventions (Hardy et al, 2006;Schneider and Hardy, 2013;Leuchter et al, 2014;Edelsbrunner et al, 2018;Schalk et al, 2019), the aim of the current experimental study was simply to zoom in on the effect of item variation during hands-on exploration. Nevertheless, by placing the current findings in the context of inquiry-based learning, this study, like those classroom studies, emphasizes the importance of both considering fundamental learning processes in science education design and introducing science early (Leuchter et al, 2014).…”