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Erin Furtak (Working Title) Negotiating
Problems with Answers in Guided Science Inquiry: The National Science
Education Standards (National Research Council, 2001) provide a
philosophical orientation, general guidelines, and teaching vignettes that
create a vision for science inquiry; however, they do not provide a clear
description of guided science inquiry, a particular kind of activity which
has particular goals for student learning (Magnusson & Palinscar, 1995).
Guided science inquiry presents particular challenges to teachers, or
problems with answers, that arise when teachers attempt to bring
students, through a process of induction, to the particular answers
predicated by the curriculum without directly divulging those answers
(Driver, 1983; Edwards & Mercer, 1987; Shulman & Keislar, 1966). The
proposed study responds, on a small scale, to a call for an expanded
vision of science inquiry across a range of curricula and classroom
contexts (Songer, Lee, & McDonald, 2004). The study will take place in the
context of a physical science unit that consists of well-defined
investigations in which students are expected to learn, through a process
of inquiry, a density-based explanation of sinking and floating. Four
teachers were selected from a larger pool of teachers involved with a
previous nationwide study (Shavelson & Young, 2000) on the basis of
posttest achievement scores to represent low and high achieving students.
Through an analysis of discussions from each of the four classrooms
videotaped at key investigations in the unit, supplemented by in-depth
interviews of each teacher, case studies will be constructed describing
each teacher's approach to guided science inquiry. Results of cross-case
analyses will be compared with measures of student learning of
density-related concepts taken from assessments embedded in the unit and
administered at the completion of the unit. Overall results will be used
to inform the beginnings of a typology of guided science inquiry teaching.
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