Elementary Students' Laboratory Record Keeping During Scientific Inquiry

Abstract

The present study examines the mutual interaction between students' writing and scientific reasoning among sixth‐grade students (age 11–12 years) engaged in scientific inquiry. The experimental task was designed to promote spontaneous record keeping compared to previous task designs by increasing the saliency of task requirements, with the design goal of making the relationship between record keeping and inquiry strategies more explicit and visible. Compared to previous studies, this new task design resulted both in a higher amount of record keeping overall and in a higher quality of information, which is interpreted to be a result of increased participants’ metatask and metastrategic knowledge arising from greater engagement with the task. The study found a significant relationship between the quality of students' record keeping and the inquiry strategies that were investigated. However, this relationship varied depending on the type of inquiry strategy. Strategies that are employed during the design of experiments (i.e., factorial combination strategy and control‐of‐variables strategy [CVS]) were statistically related to the number of complete comments (plans and intents), but not with the total number of comments. In contrast, the study found that for strategies employed while evaluating evidence (i.e., drawing inferences), student production of quality records is a necessary but not sufficient condition for effective evidence evaluation; in addition to recording high‐quality information, students must also review their records (both from design and evaluation phases).

Keywords:

• Elementary school
• Inquiry
• Laboratory work
• Metacognition
• Reasoning
• Record keeping

Notes

1. According to Klahr and Dunbar (1988), the problem space investigated is the total possible number of unique combinations of variables that would constitute the database from which inferences can be made.

2. A complete note was defined as any note that referred to an experiment that contained all of the antecedents if it was an intent (before the experiment was done) and all antecedents and the outcome if it was an assertion (a record of an experiment already performed).

3. Fastplants are a species of a fast‐developing cabbage (Brassica) that completes their life cycle in 14 days.

4. These instructions are based on the engineering model of investigation (‘produce the best outcome’) versus the scientific model (‘find out how the system works’) (Schauble, Klopfer, & Raghavan, 1991).

5. The term ‘plant’ is used as equivalent to ‘experiment.’ Each plant is designed according to the three factors under inquiry; therefore, it can be considered an experiment regardless of what other plant it is compared to.

6. All names are pseudonyms.

7. One child did not make any entries.