Aspects of Teaching and Learning Science: What students' diaries reveal about inquiry and traditional modes

Abstract

We present an analysis of students' reflective writing (diaries) of two cohorts of Grade 8 students, one undergoing inquiry and the other traditional science teaching. Students' writing included a summary of what students had learned in class on that day and their opinions and feelings about the class. The entries were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. This analysis of students' first-person accounts of their learning experience and their notes taken during class was useful in two ways. First, it brought out a spectrum of differences in outcomes of these two teaching modes—conceptual, affective and epistemic. Second, this analysis brought out the significance and meaning of the learning experience for students in their own words, thus adding another dimension to researchers' characterisation of the two teaching methods.

Keywords:

• inquiry
• characterisation
• outcomes
• reflective writing
• middle school

Acknowledgements

The initial suggestion of giving notebooks to students for maintaining class and homework records was given by J. Kumbhare, one of the teachers in the inquiry batch. These diaries formed the basis of the present paper; we acknowledge the significance of this idea. We appreciate the participant students' and teachers' involvement with this study. We thank A. Farkade for helping in classroom observations. We also thank P. Nambiar, S. Shome and Mashood K.K., who helped in evaluating conceptual understanding of the diary entries; O. J. Harish, S. Patil and A. Sawant for valuable help in preparing the final manuscript and Arvind Kumar who gave helpful comments on a draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Emphases in all the students' responses are added by the authors and the text in square brackets are authors' comments.

2. Reproducing the student's editing