Connecting Inquiry to the Nature of Science as a Metacognitive Resource

Erin E. Peters

February 9, 2006

Authentic inquiry in a classroom requires the teacher to understand how science operates as a discipline (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993; National Research Council, 1996). If the teacher does not understand how knowledge is obtained and verified as scientific knowledge, then inquiry in the classroom is limited to teaching process skills rather than knowledge about science. If a teacher understands the nature of science, he or she is better able to pose questions to students about why they are doing process skills as well as establishing an environment that allows students to construct meaningful scientific knowledge.

The nature of science can be understood as the culture of science. Scientists have inherent, agreed upon processes and assumptions (Lederman, 1999) that help them to construct meaningful knowledge. For example, workbench scientists use their creativity and inquire to expand the current scientific body of knowledge. Workbench scientists present their findings to professional scientists for verification (Magnusson, Palinscar, & Templin, 2004). In this way scientists work as a community to uphold the processes and assumptions that comprise the nature of science.

Many teachers have only a surface understanding of how science operates as a discipline. Allow me to use the metaphor of travel to illustrate the implications of teachers’ practical knowledge about the discipline of science. If someone from America travels to France but will only eat at fast food restaurants, they come away with a skewed version of French food. This person would think that France has a very limited selection of food, because it was difficult to find the restaurants he desired. Didactic teaching of science is like fast food. Inquiry that teaches process skills without teaching why these skills are important to the construction of scientific knowledge offer only a surface understanding of the culture of science. If students are offered “fast food” versions of how science operates as a discipline, students will leave the classroom understanding that there is a collection of facts that are scientific, but not much else.

The attempt to teach the nature of science didactically is a futile one. Students need to think deeply about the nature of science in order to have more that a rote understanding of the discipline of science. Teaching the nature of science out of the context of scientific knowledge and inquiry does not give students access to the important connection between scientific knowledge and knowledge about science. Research shows that teaching teachers about the nature of science by didactic, disconnected or implicit means has limited success (Abd-El-Khalick & Akerson, 2004). Even teachers with an elaborate understanding of the nature of science and who are motivated to teach their students about the nature of science have unproductive outcomes when trying to explicitly identify aspect of the nature of science during inquiry activities (Akerson, Abd-El-Khalick & Lederman, 2000). The mechanism I propose to use to teach students to think deeply about the nature of science is metacognition.

Students who are self-regulated are metacognitively, motivationally, and behaviorally active participants in their own learning process (Zimmerman, 1989). Metacognition is the ability to think about and evaluate your own thinking processes (Brown, 1987) and is a part of being a self-regulated learner (Zimmerman, 1989). In order to accomplish the goal of learning about the nature of science, students can perform an inquiry activity and think about why they are conducting certain processes and evaluate their thinking in terms of the way a scientist might think about the processes and outcomes. Most research in the field of metacognition and science has been focused on allowing students to conduct scientific activities and listening to group conversations or asking students to talk aloud about their thinking. These are passive activities and do not give the students the modeling they may need to understand the aspects of the nature of science. A typical student is not exposed to the culture of science, so the teacher needs to provide the scaffolding that will illustrate how scientists think and operate. Metacognitive prompts built from the identified aspects of the nature of science (McComas, Almazroa & Clough, 1998) will give teachers a vehicle to scaffold scientific thinking to students who are underexposed to this type of thinking. Actively prompting students to evaluate their scientific thinking brings them closer to authentic scientific inquiry.

Developing metacognitive skills should also be an explicit activity in the science classroom. Research shows that self-regulated skills can be developed through four stages: observation, emulation, self-control and self-regulation (Zimmerman, 2000). Since metacognition is a part of self-regulation, the four stages can be adopted to help students think like scientists. Instead of just asking questions that prompt metacognition and hoping students will think deeply, students should be gradually scaffolded to the ultimate goal of metacognition using observation, emulation, self-control and self-regulation.

Observation entails vicarious induction from a proficient model. In the case of an inquiry unit exploring electricity and magnetism, a teacher can ask students to observe by placing a sample observation in the laboratory worksheet. For example, when asked to rub objects together to make static electricity, this statement should be included in the laboratory worksheet as a proficient model. “Observation: Rubbing the silk on the glass 50 times produces more sparks when pulled the silk was pulled from the glass than silk rubbed on glass only 10 times. This is a sample of what a scientist might write about this exploration.”

Emulation is an imitation of the general pattern of the model. Students can be prompted to emulate the observation the scientist made. “Now use the silk and glass to create static electricity and write an observation using the scientist’s as a pattern”

Self-control shows a guided practice of the mental skill. Students should practice writing an observation and compare it to a similar observation made by a scientist. “Rub the wool and plastic to produce static electricity and write an observation of your findings.” After the student writes an observation, they can be presented with a checklist of the factors a scientist would consider in making the observation: 1) The observation can be reproduced by another person, 2) there is no judgment in my observation (this is good, bad, ugly), 3) my observation has qualities that are measurable (such a standard measuring system, not relative such as big or small), 4) my observation is descriptive (no pronouns such as it), 5) I would be able to understand my observation months or years from now.

Self-regulation is the adaptive use of the mental skill. Students at this stage should be able to explain their thinking in terms of a scientific way of knowing. An example of a metacognitive prompt at this level would be “Are your observations relevant to the purpose of the investigation?” A student at this level should be able to think about and evaluate their ideas according to a scientific way of knowing.

The culture of science is passed down from generation to generation through science classes. If each generation receives the idea that science is a body of knowledge and has no access to the nature of science, knowledge about how science generates and verifies knowledge will no longer be part of the public’s understanding of science. Education has a responsibility to teach students how to think like a scientist in order to continue to be progressive, critical thinkers in our technological future.

References

Abd-El-Khalick, F. & Akerson, V. L. (2004). Learning as conceptual change: Factors mediating the development of preservice elementary teachers’ views of the nature of science. Science Education, 10, 101-143.

Akerson, V. L., Abd-El-Khalick, F. & Lederman, N. G. (2000). Influence of a reflective explicit activity-based approach on elementary teachers’ conceptions of the nature of science. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 37, 295-317.

American Association for the Advancement of Science. (1993). Benchmarks for scientific literacy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Brown, A. (1987). Metacognition, executive control, self-regulation, and other more mysterious mechanisms. In F. E. Weinert and R. H. Kluwe (eds.), Metacognition, Motivation and Understanding (pp. 65-116). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

Lederman, N. G. (1999) Teachers’ understanding of the nature of science and classroom practice: Factors that facilitate or impede the relationship. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 36, 916-929.

Magnusson, S. J., Palincsar, A. S. & Templin, M. (2004). Community, culture, and conversation in inquiry-based science instruction. In L. B. Flick and N. G. Lederman (eds.), Scientific Inquiry and Nature of Science (pp. 131-155). Boston, MA: Kluwer Acadmic Publishers.

McComas, W. F., Almazroa, H. & Clough, M. P. (1998). The nature of science in science education: An introduction. Science & Education, 7, 511-532.

National Research Council. (1996). National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Zimmerman, B. J. (1998). Developing self-fulfilling cycles of academic regulation: An analysis of exemplary instructional models. In D. H. Schunk & B. J. Zimmerman (Eds.), Self-regulated learning: From teaching to self-reflective practice (pp. 1-19). New York, NY: The Guildford Press.