INQUIRY, MODELING, AND METACOGNITION - MAKING SCIENCE ACCESSIBLE TO ALL STUDENTS

Our objective has been to develop an instructional theory and correspo nding curricular materials that make scientific inquiry accessible to a wide range of students, including younger and lower achieving studen ts. We hypothesized that this could be achieved by recognizing the imp ortance of metacognition and creating an instructional approach that d evelops students' metacognitive knowledge and skills through a process of scaffolded inquiry, reflection, and generalization. Toward this en d, we collaborated with teachers to create a computer enhanced, middle school science curriculum that engages students in learning about and reflecting on the processes of scientific inquiry as they construct i ncreasingly complex models of force and motion phenomena. The resultin g ThinkerTools Inquiry Curriculum centers around a metacognitive model of research, called the Inquiry Cycle, and a metacognitive process, c alled Reflective Assessment, in which students reflect on their own an d each other's inquiry. In this article, we report on instructional tr ials of the curriculum by teachers in urban classrooms, including a co ntrolled comparison to determine the impact of including or not includ ing the Reflective Assessment Process. Overall, the curriculum proved successful and students' performance improved significantly on both ph ysics and inquiry assessments. The controlled comparison revealed that students' learning was greatly facilitated by Reflective Assessment. Furthermore, adding this metacognitive process to the curriculum was p articularly beneficial for low-achieving students: Performance on thei r research projects and inquiry tests was significantly closer to that of high-achieving students than was the case in the control classes. Thus, this approach has the valuable effect of reducing the educationa l disadvantage of low-achieving students while also being beneficial f or high-achieving students. We argue that these findings have strong i mplications for what such metacognitively focused, inquiry-oriented cu rricula can accomplish, particularly in urban school settings in which there are many disadvantaged students.