Methods

· Pre and Post Intervention

o MOLES-S – Metacognitive Orientation Scale (Likert)

o MONOS – Metacognition on the Nature of Science (Likert)

o VNOS-B – Views of the Nature of Science (Free response)

o SELF – Self-regulatory efficacy (Percent scale)

o Content test on electricity and magnetism (Free response)

· During

o Student products

o Teacher/Researcher memos

o SELF at midpoint

· After

o Focus Groups – Experimental & Control

o Think Aloud of one activity – Experimental & Control

In one way, it is difficult to express what the most important pieces of this map are because the ideas/events are interdependent. Even the pieces that are intended to provide ancillary information, such as the teacher/researcher memos, will probably be very important in illuminating an aspect of a phenomenon in the pieces that provide the core information. I have resolved this dilemma (at least to myself) by looking through different lenses at this design and finding the most important pieces for each particular lens.

Looking at this project through the self-regulatory lens requires one to look at the interaction of personal factors behavioral factors, and environmental factors as explained in terms of social cognitive theory in the outcomes of the project, which makes the Social Cognitive Theory piece important. The first task in looking through this lens is to realize that metacognition is one part of self-regulation and is difficult to describe/explain without considering other factors. Looking through a self-regulatory lens, the measures of performance become prominent. The MOLES-S examines the metacognitive orientation of the activities in science class (personal and environmental) and the MONOS attempt to extract the metacognitive features of student thinking about the nature of science (personal and behavioral) while the SELF survey attempts to look at self-regulation in terms of academic questions (personal and behavioral). All three of these surveys have overlap in the constructs of the study, metacognition, knowledge of the nature of science, and self-regulatory efficacy, as well as having overlaps in the three realms of social cognitive theory. All of these surveys explain the outcomes of the student, so data sources have been created to determine the processes of the students. The think aloud groups should help in explicating how students approach problems given different levels of support and conversely, how the environment (prompts or no prompts) helps students to make cognitive leaps (or not). The focus groups should help to describe the common experiences students had in the control and in the experimental groups. Through these data, processes used by students to become more metacognitively oriented could be found. The parts of the research questions related to the constructs of metacognition and self-regulatory efficacy are important because they link the theory, goals, methods and validity in these areas.

If one looks at this study through a pedagogical lens, you could see this study informing ideas about the value of inquiry learning. Why do science teachers continue to teach using mostly worksheets and book work instead of authentic learning experiences such as inquiry? I suspect it is because teachers have been socialized to implement “professional” curriculum instead of thinking for themselves. They are given ancillary materials with their textbook, so often teachers think that they can’t make up activities that are better than the fill-in-the-blank sheets. Teachers don’t try to think beyond the sheets they are given, and students have aren’t challenged to learn conceptual frameworks in science (knowledge about science in the design map). Looking through the pedagogical lens, the goal of restructuring teacher as sole authority and improving student conceptual scientific thinking takes on great importance. Embedded metacognitive prompts cannot be placed in a fill-in-the-blank sheet because students don’t think in terms of relationships and connections when asked to complete such tasks. If teachers can be given some (only some) structure to their inquiry units, such as a 4-phase EMPNOS, then they might be given the confidence to create more unique inquiry units. In this case, the validity ranks high in importance. If I am trying to show that 4-phase EMPNOS is useful to others through this project, it should be shown to be valid. The validity of this study must be built up and emphasized if other researchers and teachers are expected to consider using 4-phase EMPNOS.

Looking through a philosophical lens, one sees the greater understanding of the nature of science as important. Many science teachers teach science as a collection of facts in their final form rather than showing how scientific ideas are tentative. Students experience conflict when they read about current scientific discoveries that do not match up to the facts they learned in science. If students are to have an intelligent voice in our science-dependent society, it is more important that they learn science in their school careers as a discipline rather than a collection of facts. Through this lens, the goal of improving conceptual thinking, the conceptual framework pieces of the nature of science and scientific knowing, and the measures of VNOS-B, think aloud and focus group become most important. The parts of the research questions emphasizing knowledge about the nature of science and scientific conceptual knowledge become more prominent.

This study has many layers and it is difficult to pinpoint the most important factors without looking at each layer individually. In addition to examining different constructs such as metacognition, knowledge of the nature of science, scientific content knowledge, and self-regulatory efficacy in terms of measurement, this project can be apportioned into layers by other concepts: self-regulation, pedagogy, and philosophy of science. Each layer, when examined individually, divulges different important aspects. When examined as a whole, the project layers bolster each other.