<ABSTRACT>

THE ANALYSIS OF INQUIRY LEARNING AMONG HIGH SCHOOL BIOLOGY STUDENTS AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE DEVELOPMENT

OF AN INSTRUMENT FOR EVALUATING INQUIRY

ACTIVITY IN SCIENCE CURRICULA

Myung Hur (Doctoral Dissertation, Columbia University)

An inquiry approach in teaching science has been advocated by many science educators for the past few decades , and most elementary and secondary science curricula have incorporated it in varying degrees. It has been proven in recent studies, however, that there exists considerable discrepancy between the expectation of outcomes of the inquiry approach and the actuality. This in part implies that there is a somewhat urgent need for the systematic evaluation of the approach in teaching science.

The purpose of this study is to develop a comprehensive instrument for evaluating inquiry teaching approaches embedded in science curricular materials. The instrument can serve as an effective method for analyzing science textbooks and laboratory guides in terms of the quality and quantity of inquiry, as well as in terms of the balance and harmony of various aspects of inquiry. To develop a more valid and reliable instrument a set of empirical data was used in the developmental procedure, and most of the previous studies regarding inquiry teaching method and inquiry evaluation were consulted.

The empirical data were collected by presenting a series of inquiry lab experiences to fifty-seven tenth-grade biology students and correlating their performance on these experiences with their achievement on a science process test developed by BSCS. The Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient between the two variables was significant and relatively high (r=.62, p<.01). The coefficient indicates that thirty-eight per cent of variance in the inquiry lab performance can be predicted or explained by the achievement on the test. This implies that the test may be used to diagnose the readiness of students for inquiry laboratories and to determine the appropriate level of inquiry experiences for a group of students by comparing the inquiry experiences with the selected inquiry Labs in this study. For the comparison of inquiry labs, the instrument developed in this study can be used to evaluate various aspects of inquiry activity.

The inquiry lab items were classified into four categories of increasing cognitive demand . then an analysis of variance (ANOVA) was done for the four subscores. The results of ANOVA indicated that there exists significant difference among the means of the four subscores. This may in part provide some validation of categorizing the items into the four groups. The first part of the instrument uses the four categories as a classification scheme of science process skills.

It must be noted, however, that the empirical study has some limitations. mainly because no in-time evaluation of actual performance of students was carried out during the data collection about inquiry labs. This kind of evaluation is recommended if reliable data can be obtained by maximally eliminating the evaluator's subjectivity, though it may require much more time and efforts. The inquiry evaluation method developed in this study, called the Scientific Inquiry Evaluation Inventory(SIEI), is composed of three parts: (1)analyzing and coding each science process task of inquiry activity; (2)evaluating each inquiry activity as a whole; and (3)evaluating each science laboratory curriculum as a whole.

The first part of the instrument consists of twenty science process categories and thirty subcategories grouped into four sections: (1)gathering and organizing data; (2)interpreting and analyzing data; (3)synthesizing results and evaluation; and (4)hypothesizing and designing an experiment. The science process categories are arranged according to the level of difficulty, psychological level of thinking, degree of creativity demand, and the model of the process of scientific inquiry, which is also developed in the study.

The second part of the instrument contains four evaluation scales of inquiry activity: (1)competition/cooperation scale; (2)discussion scale; (3)openness scale; and (4)inquiry scope scale. And the last part consists of three methods for evaluating a science laboratory curriculum as a whole: (1)inquiry pyramid; (2)inquiry index; and (3)difficulty index. The instrument is designed to be used by teachers, science curriculum developers and science education evaluators for the purpose of diagnosing the nature and appropriateness of scientific inquiry introduced in secondary science curricular materials, especially in laboratory work and field work.