3RD AND 4TH GRADERS CONCEPTIONS OF REPEATED TRIALS AND BEST REPRESENTATIVES IN SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS

This study involved 24 third- and fourth-grade students in a suburban school in the Chicago area. These children had been learning science t hrough a reform-based, integrated science and mathematics curriculum f or about 2 years. In this study I explore how these children made sens e of a scientific procedure that had been introduced to them and they had used before in their own experimental inquiries: performing repeat ed trials and determining the best representative of the measurements of a continuous dependent variable. Specifically, I explore how childr en made sense of the variability in the results of repeated trials, ho w their ideas of repeated trials and best representatives are related to their understandings of the sources of the variability, and how the y thought about what would be the best representative of their measure ments. The data and analysis reveal the complexity of the understandin gs involved in this apparently simple procedure, as children attempted to appropriate for themselves the procedure that had been introduced to them. The results support the idea that many of the children had no t conceptualized the procedure of repeating trials and finding the bes t representative of the results in the way adult practitioners do. The y also point to the value of introducing children to such experimental procedures. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.