After reading this chapter, I realized that its main focus were to ensure that all students were able to do scientific inquiry. According to the National Science Education Standards (NRC 1996) states; “all children should have the ability to do scientific inquiry by fourth grade”. This article states that each student should be able to ask questions. They should be able to plan and as Wendy Pierce (2008) said, “conduct simple investigations”, use simple materials and tools to gather information. Then they should be able to use this information to explain what they investigated to the other students.
During 1999-2000, the author participated in a special assignment with the Keystone Grant. One of the goals of this assignment …show more content…
Pierce (2008) stated; “teachers are uncomfortable sorting questions (Harlen 1997)”. The author realized that teachers felt like they won’t ready to help the students with the difficult questions because they may lack information.
The author realized that teacher were looking for more structure than the open-ended inquiry. The author noted that in the, “how to make a lab activities more open-ended” (Colburn 1997). According to W. Pierce (2008), “Colburn writes about varying levels of openness in instruction ranging from a level 0 to level 3. Level 0 refers to the students are given the problem, the instruction and answers are given and level 3 refers to the students given the problem, the instruction and the answers are all open.
The author was aware that students should experience open-ended inquires, but she was also aware of the challenges the teachers face when teaching inquires. When the author participated in the assignment with the other teachers at the Keystone Grant they developed a “doable” format of …show more content…
Pierce (2008) the steps to inquiry takes approximately 45 to 60 minutes in a classroom. The steps to inquiry were divided into different categories. Each category were broken up into days, depending on the topic/ article. The first category was developing questions; this is the brainstorming stage where the students would try to create a list of independent and dependent variables. The students can use the question wheel by cutting out two circles a large circle and a small circle. The circles will be divided according to the number of variables there are for both independent and dependent. This activity make take one day to