Inquiry and Experimental Design: An Investigation Continues

Inquiry-based learning has five essential features that apply across all grade levels. Each feature should be present at some time over the course of a series of lessons. The first feature is that students need to begin with a question that can be answered in a scientific way. Sometimes, questions will develop from something the students observe and suggest. Other times, the teacher provides the question. Either way, students must be able to investigate the questions in a developmentally appropriate way in a junior high classroom. For my class all I said was Tropisms: do they happen? Each group chose a tropism and designed their own experimental design project. These projects are long-term and will probably take about 4-6 weeks to complete. Each day they will come in and collect data and make observations.

 Secondly students rely on evidence in attempting to answer the question. In our case, this evidence is coming from designing and conducting an investigation; tropism experimental design. They are collecting evidence daily by making observations and following their pre-set procedures. Third, students form an explanation to answer the question based on the evidence collected. Scientific explanations provide causes for effects and establish relationships based on evidence and logical argument. In this case, do plants move? Students are answering problem statements based on tropisms and a plants response to its internal or external stimuli. For students, scientific explanations go beyond current knowledge to build new ideas upon their current understanding. They wrote their own hypothesis and are designing and implementing their entire research project, experimental design on their own.

Next, students evaluate their explanation. Students consider questions such as the following: Can other reasonable explanations be based on the same evidence? Are there any flaws in the reasoning connecting the evidence to the explanation? They must look fundamentally at their research and decide if there were any errors or issues that might have impacted their results. Analyzing and reflecting on their research will help them determine if they supported their hypothesis and if their results are reliable and valid. Finally, students will communicate and justify their proposed explanations with the class. They will write a developed conclusion based on their data and observation made over this six weeks. Sharing explanations can help strengthen or bring into question their procedures of experimental design as well as their reasoning in connecting the evidence from their experiments to their explanations. It is critical that after this six week experiment that they see the big picture. If tropisms occur, how does this impact plants? How does this phenomenon impact the plant world and beyond?