Beyond Final Form Science

Teaching and Learning Scientific Inquiry

with support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations

Project Overview

People

Papers and presentations

Background
High school science is failing most students, judging by just about any assessment we care to use. On national assessments, forty percent of 8th and 12th graders have less than even a basic understanding of important scientific ideas and practices (NAEP). For decades now, inquiry has been hailed as the approach to help our students learn science deeply, to not just learn the "final form" ideas, but to learn how to do science. Yet, inquiry-oriented teaching remains rare. On the other hand, over the last 15 years many technology-supported science learning environments have been developed, and have been shown effective in helping students learn science concepts and scientific inquiry skills. With such tools, and what we've learned about student learning by studying their use, we have an opportunity to support teachers efforts to teach scientific inquiry.

Goals
BFFS is a research and professional development colllaboration between researchers, teachers, and teacher educators to understand better how to support teachers' efforts to enact inquiry-oriented science instruction in their classrooms, and to learn how inquiry teaching practices develop. The project includes more than a dozen teachers working at schools throughout urban Los Angeles. We are developing a network of collaborating teachers who work together to develop:

• our ideas about science and scientific inquiry, especially related to inquiry in biology
• strategies to elicit and build upon students' thinking, especially to generate authentic inquiry opportunities for students
• ways of reflecting upon teaching strategies that can support students' development as critical inquirers into scientific questions
• strategies for integrating technological supports for inquiry into instruction

As a research project, we are interested in documenting our efforts in a way that can help us to build systematic knowledge about the kinds of knowledge and practices that skilled inquiry teachers use when they teach, and how such knowledge and practices develop in new teachers.