Working Group on Introductory Science Education

Interesting conversation Friday with Susan Stone, Al Gaspar, and Alison Levie, reviewing some of Alison's/Al's experience with "inquiry" education in a third grade class. What struck me particularly was similarities between the experiences Alison was having at the third grade level and experiences I and others have been having at the college level. And the need to make clearer the differences between a general "inquiry" approach and the more specific "open-ended transactional inquiry" approach that we've been developing/exploring.

Alison has been teaching an integrated science/social science unit on water, with Al providing support for hands on experiments. Both are enthusiastic about what has been happening but also thoughtfully and appropriately critical of it. One touchstone for conversation was a hands on activity in which students were given the task of determining the freezing temperature of water and ended up with a variety of results substantially different from 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Issues that were raised included whether they should be given the "right" answer, and whether the time expended was actually worth it in terms of educational outcome.

The specific case in turn poses some more general questions. Does "inquiry" necessarily mean "hands-on"? And, if so, what about the problems that its hard to find/create/motivate questions that can be approached in a "hands-on" fashion, that such activities take substantial amounts of time, and that they may not result in the "right answer"?

My own feeling is that it is important to see "hands-on" as a significant component of "inquiry" education but not at all as equivalent to it, both because of the problems noted and for some more general reasons. That inquiry has as its foundation observations made by human beings is a key element of inquiry based education. And giving students opportunities to make observations themselves and generate new understandings and new questions from those observations is essential to their development as inquirers. But inquiry ("transactional") depends as well on the use of observations made by others, and so one shouldn't feel limited entirely to observations made by students themselves. It is not only allowable but desirable in inquiry education to introduce students to observations made by others (carefully distinguishing between the observations themselves and the interpretations of them made by others).

This in turn suggests that "hands-on" is not the end all and be all of inquiry education, and that activities of this kind need to be chosen/developed and used so as to be appropriate within a broader context. My own sense is that there are several important guidelines in this regard. Perhaps the most important is that "hands-on" activities should never be used to convey "content", ie to get students to some particular understanding (eg the freezing temperature of water). It is not only that hands-on activities are a painfully slow and unreliable way to get to particular understandings but also that using them in this way sets up expectations that are in fact inconsistent with the more general objective of enhancing inquiry sophistication: students become concerned with whether they are getting the "right" answer, and teachers with whether they have gotten it. Far better is to design "open-ended" hands-on experiences, ones in which the focus is on the process (accepting its necessarily indeterminate outcome), rather than on achieving any particular outcome. These are far more likely to help students appreciate the relation between observations and interpretations, the dynamic interaction between the two that underlies inquiry, and their own capability to make both observations and interpretations.

From this perspective, I think some additional guidelines are important for selecting/designing and using "hands-on" activities. One is that the activities should not put extensive "background" demands on students (or teachers). Becoming aware that there are ways to make observations other than what one is used to is important, but if too much time has to be spent explaining how to make observations the focus tends to shift from the inquiry itself to the procedures. More generally, one wants inquiry to feel like (as it is) an extension of one's own ways of exploring rather than a special activity that can only be done with elaborate prior preparation and equipment. Once one has dropped a "content" expectation for hands-on activities, it becomes easier to imagine such activities without a demand for elaborate preparation. And to design them in ways that build incrementally on the existing expertise of students (and teachers).

A second important guideline for "hands-on" activities in a broader inquiry context is that they should be not only "open-ended", in the sense of having an indeterminate outcome, but also "productive". This, I think, is the most significant creative challenge in developing hands-on activities. It is not enough to give students something to "play with" and presume that something worthwhile will result. It frequently won't, and both students and teachers will end up feeling aimless and disappointed. What instead is needed is to give students something that will surprise them, ie an opportunity to make a set of observations that will not fit easily into their current understandings, and that will cause them to generate candidate new understandings that in turn will generate new questions that can be further explored. "Productive" doesn't mean achieving a particular understanding but rather moving beyond current understandings. And "open-ended" does not mean without direction, but rather organized to encourage movement in any of a variety of directions that could represent new understanding.

Actually, I think what comes out of this is a set of principles not only for "hands-on" activities but for t.o-e.i. based classroom activities in general:

1. Give students observations that will surprise them
2. Get students to create new understandings ("stories") that make sense of them
3. Get students to think about implications of their stories, new questions, new needed observations that arise from them
4. Repeat over and over again

With this overall strategy, one can mix "hands-on" activities and activities reflecting observations by others in different balances depending on the subject and student backgrounds, developing both the skills of making/interpreting observations of one's own and of making use of observations of others. Moreover, it seems to me that this strategy can be used not only with most subjects but at all curricular levels.

I'm curious to hear to what degree this approach makes sense in terms of other peoples' experiences and aspirations. Notice that it does not explicitly teach "laboratory skills", presuming instead that these will be acquired as part of the process. Notice too that it is less time-efficient with regard to "coverage". A good inquiry educator will have some reasonable sense of the directions a class will go in advance but needs to be committed more to the process than to being sure particular understandings are reached. And notice, of course, that one would need a way to evaluate both student achievement and class success in terms of whether particular understandings are reached by all students.

What other problems arise if one adopts something approximating a o-e.t.i. approach? Maybe this is a good starting point for our next working group conversation.