Deepening Students' Scientific Inquiry Skills During a Science Museum Field Trip

Abstract

Field trips to science museums can provide students with educational experiences, particularly when museum programs emphasize scientific inquiry skill building over content knowledge acquisition. We describe the creation and study of 2 programs designed to significantly enhance students' inquiry skills at any interactive science museum exhibit without the need for advanced preparation by teachers or chaperones. The programs, called Inquiry Games, utilized educational principles from the learning sciences and from visitor studies of museum field trips. A randomized experimental design compared 2 versions of the games to 2 control conditions. Results indicate that the groups that learned the Inquiry Games significantly outperformed the control groups in the duration and quality of several inquiry skills when using a novel exhibit, with effect sizes ranging from 0.3σ to 0.8σ. The highest gains came from an Inquiry Game that was structured and collaborative rather than spontaneous and individualized. Students and chaperones in all conditions reported enjoying the experience. These results mirror those found in a previous study in which family groups learned the Inquiry Games.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We gratefully acknowledge the creative and analytical contributions of all members of the GIVE (Group Inquiry by Visitors at Exhibits) team, particularly Ryan Ames, Mark Boccuzzi, Liana Crouch, Sarah Elovich, Beth Gardner, Malia Jackson, Adam Klinger, Nerissa Kuebrich, Suzy Loper, Anne Richardson, Lisa Sindorf, and Erin Wilson. We also wish to thank Linda Deacon, John Frederiksen, Kathleen McLean, Michael Ranney, Barbara White, and the advisors to the GIVE project. Finally, we thank the editor and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on a previous version of this article. We are grateful for the generous financial support of the National Science Foundation. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant 0411826 and work supported by the Foundation done while Sue Allen was working at the Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are our own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Notes

¹The GIVE team developed the Inquiry Games in collaboration with staff from the Exploratorium's Explainer and Institute for Inquiry programs, the Visual Thinking Strategies program staff at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and an advisory board of experts with a range of expertise.

²The Inquiry Games did not have winners and losers but were “games” in the sense that they contained steps for play, rules, and a structure for social interaction. The term game helped us focus the attention of students and chaperones on the inquiry process rather than on the exhibits used in the study.

³Participants were required to do additional administrative preparation, as described later, because they were participating in a research study, but the games themselves could be learned without the need for prior preparation.

⁴We acknowledge that this program took place within the specialized context of a research study in a lab separated from the museum floor and that all parties had agreed to participate ahead of time. Our future work will explore the degree to which chaperones can facilitate the games on the open floor.

⁵We recruited groups from public schools and used published data on their free and reduced lunch programs as a rough measure of students' socioeconomic status. In the 113 schools that sent student groups to participate in our study, an average of 49% of the students qualified to receive free or reduced lunch. We did not, however, collect socioeconomic data on individual students.

⁶To reduce distraction and group fragmentation in the lab, we covered the exhibits with tablecloths and removed them only for the exhibit in use at any given time. In addition, group members were asked to remain together at each exhibit until the entire group was ready to move on to the next exhibit.

⁷For two IR utterances to be counted as consecutive, the gap between the end of the first utterance and the start of the second had to be less than 2 s. Because of the rules of our coding scheme, this ensured that two different people uttered the two IRs.

⁸All graphs show pretest and posttest scores to emphasize the pre/post design of the study. However, our analyses compared groups based on their pre/post difference scores, thus accounting for any apparent pretest disparities across condition.

FIGURE 8 Mean time spent by groups at the pretest and posttest exhibits. There were no significant differences in any of the planned comparisons. Error bars represent standard errors.

⁹Although the planned comparison results were only marginal, we felt that post hoc tests were justified because the family study had showed a significant difference on this variable.

¹⁰Parts of this group's transcript originally appeared in Gutwill and Allen (2010b).

¹¹To determine whether the Inquiry Games affected field trip and family groups differently, we compared the inquiry behaviors from the two studies. Using a univariate analysis of variance, we set up contrasts for the interactions between audience (family vs. field trip) and the original planned comparisons (effect of prior mediation, inquiry, and pedagogy). Statistically significant interaction effects indicated differential effects of the treatment conditions on the two audiences.

¹²We found interaction effects for the following four variables: number of PAs, duration of IRs, Level 2 IRs as a percentage of IRs, and Consecutive IRs as a percentage of IRs.

¹³In a technical sense, the results could be deemed even more limited, applying only to our posttest exhibit Making Waves. However, we suggest that improvement at the posttest exhibit in the Juicy Question condition would have required successful application of that game at the two “treatment” exhibits, Floating Objects and Unstable Table. Consequently, our finding that the Juicy Question game facilitates field trip group inquiry arguably pertains to three distinct exhibits.

¹⁴Updates on the project's progress can be found at www.exploratorium.edu/partner/give.